Historical Representation: F.R. Ankersmit (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Ankersmit, F. R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804739803 ISBN 13: 9780804739801

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2002

Synopsis

This book fully recognizes the aestheticism inherent in historical writing while acknowledging its claim to satisfy the demands of rational and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, it argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.

The author shows that historical representation is essentially aesthetic, though its adequacy can be discussed rationally. He defines the criteria for representational adequacy, and examines the relationship between these criteria and value judgments. He also investigates the historicist conception of historical writing and the notions of identity and narrativity. This investigation takes place against the backdrop of the ideas of four of the most influential contemporary historical theorists: Erich Auerbach, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, and Jörn Rüsen.

The book aims to identify and to explore for historical theory the juste milieu between the extravagances of the literary approach to historical writing and the narrow-mindedness of empiricists. The search for this juste milieu leads to a rationalist aesthetics of historical writing, a position that repeats both the aesthetic dimension of all historical writing and the criteria defining the rationality of the discipline of history.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Ankersmit is Professor of History at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Among his many books are Political Representation (Stanford, 2001) and Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, 1997)

From the Back Cover

This book fully recognizes the aestheticism inherent in historical writing while acknowledging its claim to satisfy the demands of rational and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, it argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.
The author shows that historical representation is essentially aesthetic, though its adequacy can be discussed rationally. He defines the criteria for representational adequacy, and examines the relationship between these criteria and value judgments. He also investigates the historicist conception of historical writing and the notions of identity and narrativity. This investigation takes place against the backdrop of the ideas of four of the most influential contemporary historical theorists: Erich Auerbach, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, and Jörn Rüsen.
The book aims to identify and to explore for historical theory the juste milieu between the extravagances of the literary approach to historical writing and the narrow-mindedness of empiricists. The search for this juste milieu leads to a rationalist aesthetics of historical writing, a position that repeats both the aesthetic dimension of all historical writing and the criteria defining the rationality of the discipline of history.

From the Inside Flap

This book fully recognizes the aestheticism inherent in historical writing while acknowledging its claim to satisfy the demands of rational and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, it argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.
The author shows that historical representation is essentially aesthetic, though its adequacy can be discussed rationally. He defines the criteria for representational adequacy, and examines the relationship between these criteria and value judgments. He also investigates the historicist conception of historical writing and the notions of identity and narrativity. This investigation takes place against the backdrop of the ideas of four of the most influential contemporary historical theorists: Erich Auerbach, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, and Jorn Rusen.
The book aims to identify and to explore for historical theory the juste milieu between the extravagances of the literary approach to historical writing and the narrow-mindedness of empiricists. The search for this juste milieu leads to a rationalist aesthetics of historical writing, a position that repeats both the aesthetic dimension of all historical writing and the criteria defining the rationality of the discipline of history.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION

Cultural Memory in the PresentBy F. R. Ankersmit

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3980-1

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................................1PART I HISTORICAL THEORY1 The Linguistic Turn: Literary Theory and Historical Theory.....................292 In Praise of Subjectivity......................................................75PART II HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS3 Gibbon and Ovid: History as Metamorphosis......................................1074 The Dialectics of Narrativist Historism........................................1235 The Postmodernist "Privatization" of the Past..................................1496 Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia............................176PART III THEORISTS7 Why Realism? Auerbach on the Representation of Reality.........................1978 Danto on Representation, Identity, and Indiscernibles..........................2189 Hayden White's Appeal to the Historians........................................24910 Rsen on History and Politics.................................................262Epilogue.........................................................................281Notes............................................................................289Index............................................................................317

Chapter One

THE LINGUISTIC TURN: LITERARY THEORY AND HISTORICAL THEORY

In 1973 Hayden White published his by now famous Metahistory, a book that is generally regarded as a turning point-as is most suitable for a theory on tropology-in the history of historical theory. And, surely, one need only be superficially aware of the evolution of historical theory since World War II in order to recognize that historical theory has become a fundamentally different discipline since the publication of White's magnum opus. Different questions are now being asked, different aspects of historical writing are now being investigated, and it would be no exaggeration to say that thanks to White the kind of historical writing that now is the object of theoretical studies is much different from the kind of history that a previous generation of historical theorists believed to be exemplary of historical writing.

Three decades later now, at the beginning of the new century, it is arguable that this is an appropriate moment in which to assess what has and has not been achieved. In order to do so, I will address mainly the question of the relationship between the so-called linguistic turn and the introduction of literary theory as an instrument for understanding historical writing. My conclusion will be (1) that there is an asymmetry between the claims of the linguistic turn and those of literary theory; (2) that confusion between these two sets of claims has been most unfortunate from the perspective of historical theory; and (3) that literary theory has a lot to teach to the historian of historical writing but has no bearing on the kind of problems that is traditionally investigated by the historical theorist.

THE LINGUISTIC TURN AND HISTORICAL THEORY

The revolution effected by White in contemporary historical theory has often been related to the so-called linguistic turn. And quite rightly so, since White's main thesis has been that our understanding of the past is determined not only by what the past has been like but also by the language used by the historian for speaking about it-or, as he liked to put it himself, that historical knowledge is as much "made" (by the historian's language) as it is "found" (in the archives). Nonetheless, when White makes this claim he sometimes has things in mind different from the philosophers who argue for the linguistic turn. For a satisfactory appraisal of what White's revolution has done to historical theory, it will be worthwhile to identify these differences and to consider their implications.

"I shall mean by `linguistic philosophy' the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use": thus Rorty in the introduction to his influential collection on the linguistic turn. Philosophical problems arise when, as in Wittgenstein's famous formulation, "language goes on holiday" and begins to create a pseudo world in addition to the world that language has to deal with on its ordinary workdays. Initially this may seem to strengthen the empiricist's position: for does not the linguistic philosopher's program recommend that we dismiss all philosophical problems as illusory that are not reducible to either the construction of an ideal language (that cannot give rise to philosophical pseudo problems) or to empirical enquiry? And is this not in agreement with empiricist orthodoxy, as formulated already by David Hume, that all true belief can be reduced to either empirical or analytical truth? Surely, this intuition is not wholly mistaken: one need only think of Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic in order to realize that one can be both an empiricist and an advocate of the linguistic turn.

But the linguistic turn can be shown at a deeper level to have anti-empiricist implications. Empiricists and the advocates of the linguistic turn will pleasantly travel together to the station of the necessity to distinguish between speaking and speaking about speaking. Both will argue that the failure to distinguish between these two levels gave rise to the many pseudo problems that occupied traditional philosophy. But after having reached that station, each will follow his or her own route. The empiricist will tend to identify the distinction of these two levels with the distinction between empirical or synthetic truth (the level of "speaking") and analytical truth (the level of "speaking about speaking"). But here the more radical advocates of the linguistic turn will express their doubts. They will point out that this identification sins against the empiricist's own claims since it cannot be reduced to either logical truth or empirical truth-so, even on empiricist assumptions, the identification should be stigmatized as a hitherto unproven "dogma of empiricism." Next, they will emphasize that the identification is profoundly at odds with what we know about how one proceeds in the sciences: for here speaking about speaking will often be part of the acquisition of empirical knowledge. This is the procedure that Quine called "semantic ascent." And in order to illustrate what he has in mind with this notion, he asks us to consider the following example: "Einstein's theory of relativity was accepted in consequence not just of reflections on time, light, headlong bodies, and the perturbations of Mercury [hence, the level of `speaking'], but of reflections on the theory itself, as discourse, and its simplicity in comparison with alternative theories [hence, the level of `speaking about speaking']." Self-evidently, Quine was not advocating here a return to prelinguistic philosophy, since he proposes here a theory on what the "semantic ascent" from the first to the second level may contribute to empirical knowledge-and this presupposes the distinction between the two levels that had so often been ignored by prelinguistic philosophy.

In a classic essay of 1951, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," Quine had already used the linguistic turn for a frontal attack on empiricism. The dogma in question he described as the "belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independent of fact, and truths which are synthetic or grounded in fact." The dogma in question is the empiricist claim that (1) all true belief can be retraced to two sources of truth (i.e., firstly, what we know by empirical experience and, secondly, what we can derive by analytical deduction from true premises); (2) that there are no other sources of truth; and (3) that empirical truth can always be distinguished from analytical truth. Quine objected that there are true statements that can fit either category, and that, therefore, the distinction between synthetic and analytic truth is not as watertight as empiricists like(d) to believe. For an illustration of Quine's intentions, we may think, for example, of Newton's law according to which force is the product of mass and acceleration. We might say that the statement is empirically true because it is in agreement with the observed behavior of physical objects. And then it is an empirical or synthetic truth (to be situated on the level of "speaking"). But we can also say that the law is a conceptual truth about the notions of force, mass, and acceleration. Then it is an analytical truth, since it is true because of the meaning of the concepts (to be situated on the level of "speaking about speaking"). Summarizing the implications of Quine's argument against the synthetic/analytic distinction, Rorty wrote:

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" challenged this distinction, and with it the standard notion (common to Kant, Husserl, and Russell) that philosophy stood to empirical science as the study of structure to the study of content. Given Quine's doubts (buttressed by similar doubts in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations) about how to tell when we are responding to the compulsion of "language" rather than that of "experience", it became difficult to explain in what sense philosophy had a separate "formal" field of inquiry, and thus how it might have the desired apodictic character.

Hence, the crucial implication is that we cannot always be sure whether our beliefs have their origins in the "compulsion of experience"-in what empirical reality demonstrates to be the case-or in the "compulsion of language," so in what we believe on the basis of a priori, analytical, or philosophical argument. This is also why one speaks of the linguistic turn: contrary to empiricist conviction, what we believe to be true can, at least sometimes, be interpreted as a statement about reality and as a statement about the meaning of language and of the words that we use in language. So, language can be a truth maker no less than reality.

Now, a similar antiempiricist argument can be defended for historical writing as well. Even more so, as we shall see in a moment, the significance of the linguistic turn is far greater for the humanities than for the sciences. Think of a study of the Renaissance or of the Enlightenment. Then, just as in the case of Newton's law, one can say two things of such a study: In the first place it could well be argued that a historical investigation of the relevant part of the past is the empirical basis for this specific view of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. But it could be said equally well that this study presents us with a definition-or with the proposal of a definition-of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Other historians have written other books on the Renaissance or the Enlightenment and associated the Renaissance or the Enlightenment with a different set of aspects of the relevant part of the past-or, rather, with a different set of statements about the past-and this is why they came up with a different definition of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. And if this is how they decide to define the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, then all that they have been saying about it must be (analytically) true, since what they have said about it can be derived analytically from the meaning they want to give to the terms "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment." What has been said about these historical texts is then a conceptual truth, just as Newton's law can be interpreted as a conceptual truth.

Much the same can be argued with regard to terms like "revolution," "social class," and probably even for such seemingly unambiguous and well-defined terms as "war" or "peace." Take "revolution," for example. In Crane Brinton's well-known The Anatomy of Revolution, he discusses four revolutions: "the English revolution of the 1640's, the American Revolution, the great French Revolution, and the recent-or present-revolution in Russia." As the book's title already suggests, Brinton wanted to discern some features or patterns that are shared by all revolutions, and found these mainly in the fact that all revolutions seem to pass from the phase of an ancien rgime, through the reign of the moderates, to the subsequent reign of the extremists and the ultimate phase of "Thermidor." In this way a comparative analysis of revolutions allowed Brinton to discover some empirical truths about revolutions.

However, the problem of the systematization of phenomena such as revolutions is that they seem to depend as much on what one actually finds in the past as in how one decides to define the word "revolution." This observation is exemplified already by Brinton's choices of revolutions to discuss, for, while he includes the American Revolution in his study, Marxist historians will argue that this was not a revolution at all since it lacked the aspect of class struggle that Marxists see as a conditio sine qua non for a historical conflict to count as a revolution. If Brinton had adopted a different definition of the word "revolution," he would probably have ended up with different empirical findings about revolutions. Next, what would Brinton do with a social conflict resembling his revolutions in all relevant respects except for the fact that it is impossible to distinguish between the reign of the moderates and that of the extremists? Would he refuse to see this social conflict as a revolution because of this; or would he see there instead an occasion to reconsider his typology of revolutions? Both options seem to be open to him and this most powerfully suggests the equivalence of the compulsion of language and that of experience in this kind of social and historical analysis. Hence, in both the case of the Marxist resistance against revolutions without a class struggle and that of revolutions disconfirming Brinton's typology of revolutions, we are thrown back on the question "What is a revolution?" When historians have to deal with this kind of question, issues of meaning and issues of empirical fact tend to become indistinguishable. This is, however, not a weakness of historical writing: for historical discussion is our only refuge if truth de dicto and truth de re intermingle. The attempt to decide these dilemmas by sacrificing one type of truth for the other would mean, first, the end of historical writing, and rob us, next, of an indispensable instrument for coming to a better understanding of the social world we are living in.

Even more illustrative is the following example. Barrington Moore, in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, also develops a comparativist analysis of revolution, though it is an infinitely more profound one than Brinton's. In a most perceptive review, Theda Skocpol discusses Moore's concept of the so-called bourgeois revolution. She points out that for Moore the "bourgeois revolutions" are the Puritan Revolution in England of the 1640s, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War. Note that Moore, unlike Brinton, does not consider the American Revolution of 1776 to have been a "real" revolution and grants that honor (if that is what it is) only to the Civil War. In history what is ordinarily called a revolution may, for certain historians not be a revolution, whereas what is ordinarily not considered a revolution may be argued by some to have been one. Next, Skocpol observes that when Moore contrasts the bourgeois revolution to the fascist and the communist revolutions, he does so not by identifying some independent variable explaining why in some cases you would have to do with a bourgeois revolution (and in others with a fascist or communist revolution), but by merely looking at the results of the revolution in question. A revolution is a bourgeois revolution if a bourgeois state emerged from it, and a similar story can be told for the fascist and communist revolutions. In sum, revolutions are identified and named by what is caused by them. This is what he argues, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with this. However, if revolutions are given their names in this manner, the very notion of a bourgeois (or fascist and communist) revolution can no longer help us to explain the nature of the revolution in question (as Moore mistakenly thinks it could). For things can only properly be explained by their causes and not by their consequences. If this is lost from sight-as is the case with Moore-naming may start to function as a quasi-explanatory procedure. For we will then be tempted to believe that we are saying something deep and profoundly revealing about the nature of the kind of revolution in question when we label it as a bourgeois or some other kind of revolution-and that we have thus succeeded in explaining it in some way or other. What merely is a truth de dicto (because it is analytically and not empirically true that the French Revolution is a bourgeois revolution, if we have decided to fix the names of revolutions in agreement with what results from them) may under such circumstances deceitfully acquire the aura of being a truth de re. And Skocpol therefore correctly concludes that Moore's analysis "suffers from interrelated logical and empirical difficulties" (emphasis mine). Even more outspoken is the Dutch philosopher of history Chris Lorenz (who is, by the way, no less sympathetic with regard to Moore's comparative method than Skocpol) when he writes that Moore's generalizations about "bourgeois revolutions" are conceptual rather than empirical truths.

In agreement with the foregoing, I would like to emphasize that there is nothing necessarily wrong with Moore's approach. For in historical writing we will sometimes find ourselves (whether we like it or not) not being able to distinguish between truths de dicto and truths de re. At this juncture decisions are made that will determine to a large extent how we see the past. The kind of criteria that are decisive here are not reducible to questions of truth or falsity-for it is, essentially, a decision about what set of truths we shall prefer to some other set of truths when we are looking for the best account of the relevant part(s) of the past. Truth is here not the arbiter of the game but its stake, so to say.

We will then have to rely upon other criteria besides truth and falsity-it is an empiricist superstition to believe that no such criteria can be conceived of and that prejudice, irrationality, and arbitrariness are the only other options to the criteria of truth and falsity. For, as is suggested by the examples of Newton's law, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, the fact that Newton's law or statements on the Renaissance or the Enlightenment can be construed as being either empirically or analytically true does not in the least imply that we could not give good (or poor) arguments in favor of our views on Newton's law or for a specific conception of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Historical debate is sufficient proof of the fact that there are rational criteria, other than the truth criterion, that we can appeal to when we have moved to this level. It may well be that it is not so easy to identify these criteria for rational historical discussion, but it would be most "irrational" to see in this unfortunate fact sufficient reason for simply dropping the search for these criteria. The empiricist's unwillingness to recognize other criteria than the truth criterion must therefore remind us of the blind man who argues that there could not be a table in this room since he is unable to see it.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONby F. R. Ankersmit Copyright © 2001 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804739803
• ISBN 13: 9780804739801
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336