Re-Figuring Hayden White (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804760039 ISBN 13: 9780804760034

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Re-Figuring Hayden White is a reconsideration of the work of Hayden White by a group of internationally prominent scholars from the fields of history, philosophy, rhetoric, and cultural studies.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Ankersmit is Professor of Intellectual History and Historical Theory at Groningen University. Ewa Domańska is Associate Professor of Theory and History of Historiography at Adam Mickiewicz University and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. Hans Kellner is Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

RE-FIGURING HAYDEN WHITE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6003-4

Contents

Introduction: A Distinctively Human Life Hans Kellner.......................................................................1PART I. PHILOSOPHY Philosophy, an Introduction Ewa Domanska................................................................111 On the Metaphilosophy of History David Carr...............................................................................152 White's "New Neo-Kantianism": Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics Frank Ankersmit............................................343 Hayden White and the Crisis of Historicism Herman Paul....................................................................54PART II. NARRATIVE Narrative, an Introduction Frank Ankersmit..............................................................814 Narrative Persistence: The Post-Postmodern Life of Narrative Theory Nancy Partner.........................................815 "Nobody Does It Better": Radical History and Hayden White Keith Jenkins...................................................1056 Metahistory as Anabasis Andrew Baird......................................................................................1247 History: Myth and Narrative: A Coda for Roland Barthes and Hayden White Stephen Bann......................................144PART III. DISCOURSE Discourse, an Introduction Frank Ankersmit.............................................................1658 "The Burden of History" Forty Years Later David Harlan....................................................................1699 The Rhetorical Dialectic of Hayden White Allan Megill.....................................................................19010 Does the Sublime Price Explanation Out of the Historical Market? Hans Kellner............................................21611 History Beyond the Pleasure Principle? Dominick LaCapra..................................................................231PART IV. PRACTICE Practice, an Introduction Ewa Domanska...................................................................25712 Figuring the Malvinas War Experience: Heuristic and History as an Unfulfilled Promise Vernica Tozzi.....................26113 Primo Levi for the Present Judith Butler.................................................................................28214 Hayden White, Historian Richard Vann.....................................................................................0415 Hayden White: An Academic Teacher Ewa Domanska...........................................................................332Bibliography of Hayden White: Works in English...............................................................................351Contributors.................................................................................................................367Index........................................................................................................................371

Chapter One

On the Metaphilosophy of History

David Carr

Hayden White's Agenda for the Metaphilosophy of History

As everyone knows, Hayden White's Metahistory changed the philosophy of history for good. Anyone who has wanted to do serious work in the philosophy of history since its appearance in 1973 has had to come to terms with this now-classic work.

White's thesis and his approach are stated in the first two pages of his book. By considering "the historical work" as "a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse," he wants to affirm that "the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be little more than a theoretical basis for [an] ideological position." He then lays out his elaborate "theory of the historical work," and proceeds to apply it to the writings of a large collection of celebrated nineteenth-century authors.

I want to call attention to an interesting feature of White's work that has, I believe, gone largely unappreciated. He addresses himself, in the passages quoted above, to "the historical work," and the book received considerable attention for his analyses of the works of historians Leopold von Ranke, Jules Michelet, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Jacob Burckhardt. And much of White's subsequent work has been devoted to extending certain features of his "theory of the historical work" to historians in general, beyond the confines of the nineteenth century. Thus what mattered, for both White and his readers, was the impact of his analyses on our understanding and evaluation of works of history.

A large part of Metahistory is devoted to examining texts that are usually considered not "works of history" at all, but works of philosophy. He deals with as many philosophers of history (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce) as historians. The common rubric, of course, is "the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century," to which the philosophers, no less than the historians, give expression. Neither they nor their readers, however, would think of them as historians: the difference between history and philosophy, and indeed between history and the philosophy of history, was by the nineteenth century generally accepted. White, of course, finds the elements of his "theory of the historical work" in the writings of the philosophers as well as the historians, namely explanation by formal argument, emplotment, and ideological implication. These elements are discerned in philosophical theories about history, not historical narratives proper. Th us, it is important that Hayden White be recognized for his analysis and evaluation of the philosophy of history in the nineteenth century, and not only for what he says about historians.

This allows us to view Hayden White's work in a significantly different context from the usual one, and to put him into a somewhat different company of thinkers. He is usually viewed, quite correctly, as contributing to the epistemology of history (sometimes called the analytical or critical philosophy of history), which, as a field, is concerned with evaluating historians' claims to knowledge about the past. But he also belongs to the ranks of those twentieth-century philosophers who evaluated the "substantive" claims about the historical process, claims made primarily by nineteenth-century philosophers like Hegel and Marx. To be sure, these two groups of philosophers overlapped to some degree, since some analytic philosophers felt the need to dispose of the substantive philosophy of history before turning to their own epistemological analysis. But other thinkers, not associated with the analytic philosophy of history (Karl Popper and Karl Lwith are good examples), joined in this evaluation, and we can think of this project, the critique of the substantive or "classical" philosophy of history, as constituting a significant chapter in twentieth-century thought, especially in the post-World War II period. Hayden White belongs to this group too, then, and can be seen as part of the mid- to late-twentieth-century reaction to the nineteenth-century philosophy of history.

This project, it seems to me, deserves to be called something other than "metahistory," which many people now use as a generic term for the analysis of works of history; I suggest metaphilosophy of history, or the philosophy of the philosophy of history.

There are good reasons why Hayden White's contribution to this project has not attracted as much notice as other aspects of his work. By 1973 the evaluation of the classical philosophy of history had been underway for some time, and the consensus seemed unanimously negative: the classical philosophy of history was dead. Though they advanced different reasons, most philosophers concluded that its project, usually described as finding the "meaning" in the whole of history, could not be realized. Hayden White seemed to agree, and there was nothing remarkable about that. What was remarkable was what he said about history itself. Most critics of the classical philosophy of history had contrasted it unfavorably with history itself, which seemed to them capable of attaining genuine and possibly even objective knowledge. But in his analysis, White appeared to attack this view as well, and that, of course, is what attracted attention.

I think there are good reasons for returning to the examination of the classical philosophy of history and for taking Hayden White's contribution to that examination seriously. Many philosophers who dismissed the classical philosophy of history thought they had disposed of it for good and that we need no longer deal with it. But there are important issues and questions about it that remain vital, as I shall argue. Many people who read White on history itself thought he was simply dismissing history as a serious enterprise and consigning it to the scrap heap; that was never his intent, however. Indeed, because of the new light he shed on historical writing, it deserved to be examined all the more intently. The same thing is true of the classical philosophy of history: in part because of White's treatment of it, but also for other reasons, it merits a new look and a reexamination.

In this essay, I will not be writing about Hayden White's views on the philosophy of history; instead, I will reexplore the classical philosophy of history which takes account of his critique. That is, I want to undertake a post- Hayden White metaphilosophy of history. I will not limit myself to an examination written in his style or even with his basic concepts; in fact, I will be employing some strategies that are considerably at variance with his approach.

The Survival of the Classical Philosophy of History

I begin by recalling an interesting phenomenon of the last years of the twentieth century. Many philosophers and historians did a double take in 1992 when they learned of a much-discussed book by Francis Fukuyama called The End of History and the Last Man. Their puzzlement could be explained by the fact that this author seemed to be advancing anew the most notorious claim associated with Hegel's philosophy of history, namely that Freedom would triumph in the course of History. But as we've seen, Hegel's project had long since been pronounced dead. Had nobody informed Fukuyama of this?

When Fukuyama's book hit the New York Times bestseller list-and was widely discussed in the popular press-the professionals could smile condescendingly and recognize a familiar phenomenon. Arnold J. Toynbee had published his twelve-volume A Study of History, which William Dray calls "the twentieth century's best known speculative account of history as a whole," in mid-century, and Dray, one of the major figures of the analytic philosophy of history, remarks that "it was Time and Life magazines, not scholarly journals, which received that account with highest acclaim." Fukuyama's book could be safely dismissed as unserious, then, and the serious among us could spare themselves the trouble of reading it.

I mention Fukuyama's book in order to introduce my proposed new look at the classical philosophy of history. Many of the criticisms directed at some of its best-known practitioners, including Hegel, and at the whole project of such a philosophy of history, are fully justified, provided we understand this project in a certain way, namely as a theoretical enterprise advancing cognitive claims about the whole of history. And this is largely how it has been understood, not only by its critics but also by some of its advocates.

There is another way of understanding it, one which makes it both more interesting and possibly more understandable as an enterprise, perhaps less deserving of being dismissed. Dray, continuing in the passage I just quoted, hints at this: "Perhaps because an understanding of the past matters so much to most of us, and because the belief that it ought to be meaningful is so strong, interest in the speculative philosophy of history has not entirely disappeared." By this he means that its classical texts continue to be studied, though often not in the spirit intended by their authors.

I want to say something even stronger. The interest in as well as the practice of speculative philosophy continues, as the appearance of Fukuyama's book shows. I think it is also practiced in other forms, not so explicitly labeled as Fukuyama's effort. While Dray is right about why it continues, it is appropriate to inquire further into why the understanding of the past matters so much to us and why the belief is so strong that it ought to be "meaningful." Such an inquiry will convince us, I think, that not only has such philosophy not disappeared, but it is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

This is the much stronger claim that I want to advance. It requires a renewed understanding of this form of philosophy of history, one which I will pursue by returning to some of its classical texts to seek out the motivations behind the questions asked and the solutions proposed. In particular, I want to claim that the classical philosophy of history must be understood more as a practical enterprise than a theoretical one, which displays historical events along a temporal axis geared to a projected future, a future not be speculated on but to be realized. This is one reason why I want to eliminate the pejorative term "speculative" in the course of my argument. The terms "meaning" and "meaningful," used by Dray and many others in discussing this philosophy of history, must be understood in practical terms; the critics and practioners of this philosophy of history have construed "meaning" as a theoretical concept rather than as action or practice. The place to look for an understanding of the classical philosophy of history is the sense of meaning that relates to action and practice-social action and social practice, more precisely, in the temporal world. If we come to understand how our view of history is deeply rooted in the temporal structures inherent in action in the social sphere, then it will come as no surprise to us that the philosophy of history has a way of turning up again and again, long after its very possibility has been convincingly called into question.

History and the Philosophy of History

We have undertaken this re-examination of the classical philosophy of history under the assumption that it really differs from history proper. But is this assumption justified? Before the late eighteenth century, probably not. The task of telling the story of the past and that of seeking its ultimate meaning, especially in theological terms, were so closely intertwined that the distinction would be an artificial imposition. It is only after history begins to establish itself as an autonomous enterprise and to acquire the status of an academic discipline that the two tasks can be separated. As Hayden White notes, university chairs of history were first established in Berlin in 1810 and Paris in 1812, and it is only a few years after this that Hegel starts giving his lectures on the philosophy of history. Ranke famously renounces the task that had traditionally been associated with history, that of finding edification and moral lessons in past events, and encourages the development of a discipline which is nonpartisan, objective, and based strictly on documentary evidence. Hegel, in the opening pages of his lectures, endorses the division of labor between history proper and the philosophy of history, and later feels he has to defend himself against the charge that he is encroaching on "a science that regards itself as empirical."

Thus historically, at least, the establishment of history as a serious academic discipline and the establishment of the philosophy of history as a separate undertaking go hand in hand. Perhaps the new discipline of history, by restricting itself to certain very limited tasks, was leaving untouched some questions about the past and the course of history that needed to be asked and answered. The consensus among critics of the philosophy of history-and it had its detractors right from the start-was that while its questions may differ from those of history proper, the answers it comes up with are meant to be continuous with the theoretical claims made by historians. Th at is, like history, it wants to tell us the truth about the historical process; it wants to tell us about history as a whole rather than just some part of it; and it wants to tell us something about its ultimate meaning, not just the facts of what happens.

This view of the classical philosophy of history was shared by some of its most important twentieth-century critics. Karl Lwith famously characterized the whole project of seeking meaning in history, up through Hegel and Marx, as a secularized version of the Christian story of salvation, "secularized" meaning, among other things, that its religious foundation was disguised as science. Karl Popper likewise denounced what he called "historicism" as pseudo-social science. Arthur Danto, in his analysis of what he calls the substantive philosophy of history, makes the claim that philosophers, like historians, examine past events in terms of their causal relation to later events, and that this feature of past events is what we call their "meaning"; but historians do this legitimately because the later events they refer to are events that have already happened or are happening. Philosophers of history, by contrast, postulate latest or ultimate events (the "end of history" idea), which they cannot justify, and derive from these their sense of meaning for the whole of history. Thus their claims extend the legitimate inquiry of history beyond the realm in which such claims can be justified.

The Importance of Hegel's Lectures

Danto speaks of the substantive philosophy of history as a generic project or set of questions not identified with any particular philosopher. But his critique seems tailored to Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history-and logically so, for in many ways Hegel created and continues to define the field. It is true that the expression "philosophy of history" had been used by Voltaire and Herder before him, but in neither case was the impact so great. Delivered in the 1820s and published shortly after his death, the lectures represent Hegel at the height of his influence, and their relatively brief (less than 100 pages) introduction is as clear and straight-forward as it is comprehensive. Soon translated into other languages (for example, English in 1857), it has become probably the most widely read of Hegel's works. So great was Hegel's impact, that his approach to history became paradigmatic not only for many who followed his lead, but also for those who later attacked the very project of the philosophy of history. What is more, philosophers who reflected on history before Hegel are often thought, anachronistically, to have been engaged in the same kind of inquiry he was.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804760039
• ISBN 13: 9780804760034
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Ankersmit Frank, Domańska Ewa, Kellner Hans