Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801464324
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storiografia

In this book, the noted intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit provides a systematic account of the problems of reference, truth, and meaning in historical writing. He works from the conviction that the historicist account of historical writing, associated primarily with Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt, is essentially correct but that its original idealist and romanticist idiom needs to be translated into more modern terms. Rehabilitating historicism for the contemporary philosophy of history, he argues, "reveals the basic truths about the nature of the past itself, how we relate to it, and how we make sense of the past in historical writing."

At the heart of Ankersmit's project is a sharp distinction between interpretation and representation. The historical text, he holds, is first and foremost a representation of some part of the past, not an interpretation. The book's central chapters address the concept of historical representation from the perspectives of reference, truth, and meaning. Ankersmit then goes on to discuss the possible role of experience in the history writing, which leads directly to a consideration of subjectivity and ethics in the historian's practice. Ankersmit concludes with a chapter on political history, which he maintains is the "basis and condition of all other variants of historical writing." Ankersmit's rehabilitation of historicism is a powerfully original and provocative contribution to the debate about the nature of historical writing.

CHAPTER 1

Historicism

1. Introduction

There is one basic assumption underlying this entire book: that the historicist account of historical writing, here associated primarily with the writings of Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt, is basically correct1 Two comments should be added right away. First, I shall not argue for this assumption—or rather, the only argument I can offer for it is whatever plausibility there may be to the account of historical writing provided in the pages of all of this book. Second, Ranke and Humboldt’s historicism was formulated in the idealist and romanticist idiom of the 1820s and 1830s, which can no longer satisfy us in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Their argument therefore needs to be translated into more contemporary terms. Doing this is a major part of my project in this book.

Historicism, as I will use the term here, is the view that the nature of a thing lies in its history. Think of Johann Gottfried Herder: “What I am is what I have become. Like a tree, I have grown into what I am: The seed was there, but air, soil, and all the other elements around me had to contribute in order to form the seed, the fruit and the tree.”2 Or think of Ranke: “In all things, at all times, it is the origin that is decisive. The first seed goes on to work continuously throughout the whole process of development, either consciously or unconsciously.”3 Or of Wilhelm Dilthey: “What a man is, only his history can tell him.”4 In all these cases the basic insight is that the present manifestation of a thing—whether a human individual, an epoch, a state or a nation, etc.—is a mere shadow, while only its past can teach us its nature and identity. As Maurice Mandelbaum put it, “Historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within a process of development.”5

The implication is that the objects investigated by the historian cannot be defined apart from their history. In history we do not first encounter some object or phenomenon that is given to us and whose nature or identity we can then establish by carefully studying that object’s past. Admittedly, this is what it is like in the case of a biography of, say, Louis XV. But think of a history of the Cold War. The Cold War is not like an individual whose history can be written by establishing what happened to that individual between 1710 and 1774. In cases like the Cold War identities follow (from) the writing of history rather than preceding them.

In this way history undoubtedly clashes with how the world and its objects are given to us in daily experience. History is an abstraction6 from our experience of daily reality no less than science is. Given the definition of historicism adopted here, the relationship between an object and its history is inevitably circular. But this circle is not a vicious one, since the very process of endlessly moving within it is how historical knowledge and truth come into being—as is best exemplified by Dilthey’s hermeneutic circle.

Understood in this way, historicism is the historian’s counterpart to the scientist’s scientism. According to the scientistic view only science can give us reliable knowledge of objects in the world—and insofar as something’s history has any relevance at all, it can be inferred from what that thing is presently like, as geologists can infer the earth’s history from its present state. Clearly this is the exact opposite of the historicist view that a thing’s present nature (or identity) can be established by only studying its history. An obvious objection would seem to be that (1) both history and geology or astronomy rely on evidence, and (2) that in both cases the evidence is given here and now. Therefore, with respect to the inference from evidence to theory, there should be no difference between the two types of disciplines. The equally obvious rejoinder is that the issue of the inference from evidence is then considered irrelevant to the present problematic.7 However, historicism and scientism are, at bottom, ontological positions, and these cannot be assessed on the basis of epistemological considerations about the uses of evidence—unless, that is, one were to embrace the idea that epistemology determines ontology. But in that case, upholding the compatibility of history and science would rely on the premise that the mere fact that evidence is given here and now rules out any interesting epistemological differences between different disciplines. This assumption is sufficiently dogmatic to deserve no further discussion here.8

Two conclusions follow from this. First, historicism and scientism are mutually exclusive: one cannot consistently embrace both of them at one and the same time—although at different times one could (and even should). Second, no historian can avoid subscribing to historicism. For what could possibly be the purpose of his activity if he rejected the historicist claim that a thing’s nature or identity lies in its past? Without it, there would be no sense or meaning to the historian’s efforts.

Historicism, as just defined, was a German invention. Its diffusion outside Germany was never easy or spontaneous.9 Resistance against it has always been strongest in the Anglophone intellectual world. To be sure the abyss between Germany and England is by no means unbridgeable. In fact, almost a century before Herder’s triumphant annunciation of the historicist conception of the human individual quoted above, John Locke had already made much the same point.10 Nevertheless, it is as though Anglo-American thought had always remained protected by some intellectual Teflon coating against any real interaction with historicism, so that only a “light” variant of historicism was able to find its way into the Anglo-American mind.11

2. Historicism and Neo-Kantianism

One should not infer from what I have just said that the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition was responsible for the demise of historicism. For historicism was already fatally wounded before it made its entry into the Anglophone world.12

Here we should think, to begin with, of the so-called crisis of historicism. That crisis resulted from the head-on collision of historicism with the neo-Kantianism in vogue in most German universities at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Most varieties of neo-Kantianism had inherited from Kant the conviction that values must be eternally valid in order to have the authority to guide us in our moral dilemmas. This is clearly at odds with what history has on offer. This dilemma caused a profound and almost existential despair in the minds of neo-Kantian philosophers and of theologians, such as Ernst Troeltsch, who were hoping for absolute and time-transcendent moral and theological truths. Not surprisingly, historicism was accused of being the source of the neo-Kantians’ discomforts.

Three comments are in order. First, any historian, whether historicist or not, will recognize that no (moral) values have been accepted as valid for all times and places. So if the neo-Kantian and the theologian decide to remain stubbornly blind to this unpleasant fact, and if they wish to avoid any future exposure to it, they will have to abolish or discredit all of historical writing as well—and not just historicism.13 Second, if there is indeed such a conflict between plain historical fact and the neo-Kantian’s dream of eternal moral truths, had we not better awaken from this dream? What is the use of hoping for something that will never be given to you? Third, and most important, it is not part of the very concept of norms and values that they should be universally valid. Only moral philosophers with a background in natural law thinking or committed to a more orthodox formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative will believe otherwise.14 Paraphrasing H. L. A. Hart’s explanation of legal rules, we might argue that moral rules are “rules for action” and, next, that these rules will depend on the kind of social order they are meant to regulate. Each epoch has its own set of such time-specific rules and is in need of them. If one were to apply, for example, the prevalent social norms of the Middle Ages to our own time, chaos would result and vice versa. As moral beings we are historically conditioned, and indeed we should rejoice in this. For it is precisely this fact that enables us to cope in a more or less successful way with the complexities of the social order we happen to live in. Of course, the historicity of norms and values is by no means incompatible with rational criticism of them. On the contrary, reason may unite and guide us in our debates about what moral order we prefer and how to achieve it. From this perspective, the crisis of historicism was much ado about nothing, and one can only be amazed that historicists surrendered to their neo-Kantian opponents so easily and effortlessly.

But there is a more interesting dimension to the conflict between historicism and neo-Kantianism. Neo-Kantianism did not long survive its victory over historicism. In fact, a story can be told implying that, in the end, it was not neo-Kantianism but historicism that had the last word. Heidegger is the main protagonist of this story, as told by Ingo Farin in a recent article. Farin’s story goes like this.15 When neo-Kantians like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert attempted to distinguish history from the sciences, they increasingly tended to exchange traditional Kantian epistemological arguments for ontological ones. Thus Farin: “Although Windelband fails to reflect on the implications of his actual insights, we can certainly see that the categories of the idiographic sciences that he upholds—the event, the particular, the factual—turn out to be ontological categories of human life as such. Whereas Kant linked ‘the human standpoint’ to empirical reality under the laws of the understanding.”16 Much the same is true of Rickert. Farin then demonstrates that the early Heidegger made explicit what had remained only implicit in the writings of his neo-Kantian teachers.

But there was a peculiarity in his attempt to do so that would have the most far-reaching consequences. As will be clear from the quote from Farin, two things were at stake in the gradual dissolution of neo-Kantianism as occasioned by the problem of history. In the first place there was that “focus on the event, the particular, the factual,” which had moved Heidegger to concentrate on how the individual human being experiences his or her life. A case in point is his “trial lecture” of 1915. Next there was the much more revolutionary exchange of epistemology for ontology that we ordinarily associate with Heidegger’s role in modern Western philosophy. Needless to say, these are two fundamentally different issues, and adopting one of them does not compel us to embrace the other as well. But since both were the result of Heidegger’s early skirmishes with neo-Kantianism, he himself tended to link them together. The momentous consequence was that when Heidegger came to advocate in the run-up to Sein und Zeit, the exchange of epistemology for ontology, ontology was indissolubly linked to the individual’s experience of his life-world. An earlier phase in Heidegger’s intellectual development thus became the prison house for his later thought.

The paradoxical upshot of all this was that with the triumph of Heidegger’s philosophy over a tired and timeworn neo-Kantianism, historicism saw its unexpected final victory over its former enemy. But the price it paid for this was that history was now restricted to the narrow confines of the individual human being. This rendered historicism’s final victory over neo-Kantianism useless for the purposes of historical writing. For as T. W. Adorno was quick to point out, it would be wholly impossible to write history within the philosophical parameters of Sein und Zeit.17

The moral of the story just recounted is that the exchange of an epistemological neo-Kantian account of historicity for an ontological account need not be accompanied by a restriction to the sphere of the human individual. The decision to do so resulted from an unfortunate contingency in Heidegger’s intellectual b...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Historicism
• 2. Time
• 3. Interpretation
• 4. Representation
• 5. Reference
• 6. Truth
• 7. Meaning
• 8. Presence
• 9. Experience (I)
• 10. Experience (II)
• 11. Subjectivity
• 12. Politics