Abstract
Historians usually are not concerned about the issue of the ‘reality’ of the past they study and give a description of, since it does not play a part in their studies, if only because their picture of the past cannot be compared with a supposedly ‘real’ past, the only real thing they get involved with being historical evidence. It is remarkable, therefore, that F.R. Ankersmit in his philosophy of history precisely makes this subject into a major issue. He has done this, from various perspectives, in his books Narrative Logic, Historical Representation, and Sublime Historical Experience. In the first book Ankersmit makes a distinction in historiography between historical narratives, ‘narrative substances’ (meaning with this concepts like ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Cold War’), and individual statements. He argues that the first two do not refer to historical reality, but that the individual statements contained in them indeed do. In Historical Representation it is argued that, though historical narratives as such do not refer to past reality, through the metaphorically conceived notion of representation they may be considered to be linked with the past. Sublime Historical Experience consists of two parts. In the first, Ankersmit develops the unusual position that it is possible to experience the past itself directly. In the last chapter of the book the notion of sublime historical experience is expounded. It is argued that these experiences are involved when particular breaks in history occur, which make people aware of having lost a previous world for ever. In Ankersmit’s view, this painful experience brings about a trauma that cannot be repressed. It is, moreover, of a permanent nature and there is no other option than to abide by it. In this chapter, a critical assessment is made of the three books concerned.
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Notes
- 1.
F.R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague, 1983).
- 2.
Ibid., 87.
- 3.
Ibid., 102–3.
- 4.
Ibid., 56. On p. 231–2, it is said that ‘the statements in a narratio have a double function: (1) they individuate a Ns [narrative substance] … and (2) they describe reality’.
- 5.
Ibid., 73.
- 6.
Ibid., 238, 245.
- 7.
Ibid., 135, 169.
- 8.
Ibid., 154–5.
- 9.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946); revis. ed., Jan van der Dussen ed. (Oxford, 1993), 244.
Likewise, Oakeshott explains the close relationship between theories and facts as follows: ‘A theory does not correspond to a number of facts, it is those facts seen as they are when held together in a unified whole. Theories become facts by becoming more certain and established; facts become theories by being seen in a wider relationship which exhibits their implications more fully. That which is fact under one aspect is theory under another. All facts imply a theory; that is, they imply a wider relationship than that in which they are first or frequently conceived. And when that wider relationship is elucidated the result is equally a theory and a fact; a theory because it relates hitherto separate facts, a fact because these relations are not external but necessary’ (Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933), 43).
- 10.
F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001).
- 11.
Ibid., 11.
- 12.
Ibid., 13.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
F. Ankersmit, ‘Historical Experience Beyond the Linguistic Turn’, in: Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot eds., The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory (Los Angeles, London etc., 2013), 424–38, there 428. At the same place, he maintains that ‘A is a representation of B if it can function as a substitute for B, so that A has on us the effect of B somehow being around’. When he says that ‘anything can be a representation of anything else’, this not only makes the notion of representation as regards content vague, but even vacuous. Besides this, any existing object may be considered to represent the past, while it obviously goes without saying that any book or article about the past is about the past, and accordingly the past, in Ankersmit’s words, ‘somehow being around’. It is difficult to grasp what the informative value of this position could be.
- 15.
Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 14.
- 16.
See Jan van der Dussen, History as a Science. The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Dordrecht, 2012), 22–36.
- 17.
Ibid., 27.
- 18.
Ibid., 29.
- 19.
Ankersmit takes the curious position, being at variance with historical practice, that a distinction should be made between historical research and writing: ‘It is necessary to distinguish between historical research (a question of facts) and historical writing (a question of interpretation)’ (F.R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994), 34).
- 20.
Collingwood, The Idea of History, 426–96.
- 21.
Ibid., 429.
- 22.
Ibid., 429–30.
- 23.
Collingwood has extensively dealt with language in The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938), 225–69, and The New Leviathan (Oxford, 1942), 40–6.
- 24.
Collingwood, The Idea of History, 219.
- 25.
It goes without saying that this also applies to actions, since these imply thoughts as well, as Collingwood indicates with the simple example of someone crossing the street. For even simple actions like these are not done thoughtless, especially as regards crossing streets, since one’s safety is at hazard. Thoughtless actions are imaginable, of course, but when performed regularly it is not without reason considered a serious deficiency. But understanding one’s actions does not involve ‘going into one’s mind’, as Ankersmit suggests. For he comments on Collingwood’s theory of re-enactment that it ‘may carry the historian into the mind of the historical agent and that exactly this will enable him to explain the agent’s actions’ (Ankersmit, ‘Historical Experience Beyond the Linguistic Turn’, 437). But that is certainly not what Collingwood’s re-enactment theory is about. For he explicitly says that when a historian asks why Brutus stabbed Caesar he means ‘What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab Caesar?’ The cause of this event means for the historian ‘the thought in the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about’, Collingwood says (Collingwood, The Idea of History, 214–5; italics mine). It is obscure what Ankersmit means by going into someone’s mind, but it is certainly not what Collingwood says or implies. He just says what all historians do and have done: asking why Brutus stabbed Caesar, that is, his reason for doing this, implying that it is not considered to have been a thoughtless action or an accident. This has nothing to do with going into Brutus’ mind, whatever this may mean. It is striking that Ankersmit completely disregards the classical definition of humanity as animal rationale, thought and its nature accordingly not being an issue discussed by him. It is just a subject he is apparently not interested in. But Collingwood thinks otherwise and he is not to be blamed for this, especially since it is not only in line with everyday life and common sense, but also with the practice of historians.
Because of this, it is not without reason that Collingwood’s philosophy of history has proved to be more appealing for historians than any of his successors, Max Beloff calling him ‘the historian’s philosopher’ (Van der Dussen, History as a Science, 72). A recent example is the well-known historian Niall Ferguson, who says in the Preface of his Civilization. The West and the Rest (London, 2011) that ‘Collingwood has been my guide for many years, but never has he been more indispensable than in the writing of this book’ (xxii). Ferguson summarizes his fascination for Collingwood’s views on history in seven points (xxi). But also the historian and political philosopher Quentin Skinner – a prominent member of the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual history and the history of political thought – declares to have been influenced by Collingwood’s philosophy of history (James Tully ed., Meaning and Context. Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge, 1988), 103, 234). For the influence of Collingwood on Isaiah Berlin, see: Peter Skagestad, ‘Collingwood and Berlin: A Comparison’, Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (2005), 99–112.
- 26.
Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, 2005).
- 27.
Ibid., 7.
- 28.
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933), 9.
- 29.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 7.
- 30.
Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, 1973), 154.
For a discussion of Popper’s conception of a third world of intelligibles – besides the ones of physical and mental worlds –, see pp. 100–1.
- 31.
Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, 107–8; Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 113–14.
- 32.
Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, 86–168.
- 33.
‘This book defends an extreme variant of empiricism in the sense of claiming for experience a far more important role than tradition has granted to it’ (Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 8).
- 34.
See note 23.
- 35.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 73.
- 36.
Louis O. Mink, Mind, History, and Dialectic. The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Middletown, 1969), 98. On p. 117 Mink gives a diagram of Collingwood’s dialectic of mind as a scale of forms.
- 37.
In his The New Leviathan Collingwood discusses the ambiguities of feeling. Though he maintains that knowledge ‘rests on a foundation of feeling’, he puts forward, among other things, that feelings as such cannot be remembered: ‘People who think they remember a feeling are deceived, never having been careful to make the distinction, by the fact that a proposition about a feeling can be remembered. You cannot remember the terrible thirst you once endured; but you can remember that you were terribly thirsty’ (R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford, 1942), pp. 27, 34).
- 38.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 106.
- 39.
Ibid., 80.
- 40.
Ibid., 193–7.
- 41.
See Roy Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with Words (London, 1988).
- 42.
Ankersmit translates Sinn as ‘meaning’, but it is preferable to use the word ‘sense’ for Sinn. In his translation of Über Sinn und Bedeutung Max Black translates the title as ‘On Sense and Meaning’ (Peter Geach and Max Black eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford, 1980, 56–78). It is of course most confusing when ‘meaning’ is both used as a translation of Bedeutung and Sinn. In his edition of translations of Frege’s writings Michael Beany does not translate the title (‘On Sinn and Bedeutung’), but translates in the text Sinn as ‘sense’, leaving Bedeutung untranslated (Michael Beany ed., The Frege Reader (Oxford, 1997), 151–71). It is preferable to use ‘reference’ as its translation.
- 43.
Beany ed., Frege Reader, 160.
- 44.
For a more extensive discussion of Frege’s conception of indirect speech and its relevance for history, see pp. 106, 109. Indirect speech and its relevance for history is also referred to by Mink (see p. 94).
- 45.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 81.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid., 64.
- 48.
‘[T]he term historism refers to the kind of historical theory one may associate with Ranke, Humboldt, or Droysen’ (ibid., 399, n. 22).
- 49.
Berlin says of Vico that he established ‘new categories the grasp of which has altered our ideas of what kind of facts are important for the understanding of history, and why’ (Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976), 68).
- 50.
Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946), viii. Collingwood’s first book was a translation of Croce’s study on Vico (Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (London, 1913).
- 51.
It is interesting to note that Gadamer is of a different opinion, in contrast to Ankersmit being aware of Collingwood’s outspoken historist position. For in the Preface to the German translation of Collingwood’s An Autobiography Gadamer maintains: ‘In a surprising, almost mysterious way, this foreign thinker and writer is not a stranger for us, and when he now begins to talk in German to us, he is almost like someone returned back home, who far away, where he lived and struggled, never forgot his spiritual home. This home is the large spacious panorama of German Romanticism and the “historical school”, of Hegel and Schelling, Humboldt, Ranke and Droysen, Schleiermacher and Dilthey, of which the German philosophy of our decades still unmistakably bears witness’ (Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Einleitung’, in: R.G. Collingwood, Denken. Eine Autobiographie (Stuttgart, 1955), v-xiv, there vii) (my translation).
- 52.
On the relation between Collingwood and Italian philosophy, see the extensive and profound study by Rik Peters, History as Thought and Action. The Philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero, and Collingwood (Exeter, 2013). For the influence of Collingwood on Anglo-Saxon thought, see note 25.
- 53.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 89–90.
- 54.
Ibid., 90.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), 114.
- 57.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 93.
- 58.
Collingwood, The Idea of History, 447–8.
- 59.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 115.
- 60.
Ibid., 231.
- 61.
Ibid., 252.
- 62.
Ibid. 173.
- 63.
Ibid., 233.
- 64.
Ibid., 286.
- 65.
Ibid., 313.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Ibid., 314.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid., 315.
- 70.
Ibid., 261.
- 71.
Ibid., 262.
- 72.
See p. 220.
- 73.
J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, F. Hopman transl. (London, 1987). The first English translation appeared in London, 1924. Original publication in Dutch: J. Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Haarlem, 1919).
- 74.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 126–7.
- 75.
J. Huizinga, ‘Mijn Weg tot de Historie’ (‘My Way to History’), in: idem, Verzamelde Werken (Collected Works), vol. 1 (Haarlem, 1948), 11–42, there 32–3. Of the exhibition in Bruges in 1902 he says, though, that it has been an experience of ‘great importance’ with respect to his blooming historical interest, which was ‘as yet not manifested in the form of a scholarly flair, but still a vague fantastic desire for direct contact, more than anything else fed by notions of visual arts’ (32, my translation).
- 76.
Ibid., 39 (my translation).
- 77.
See note 75.
- 78.
Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 7.
- 79.
Frank Ankersmit, De Sublieme Historische Ervaring (Groningen, 2007), 171.
- 80.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, H.B. Nisbet transl. (Cambridge, 1975), 21.
- 81.
Ibid., 138.
- 82.
E.H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969), 14–25.
- 83.
Ibid., 14.
- 84.
Ibid., 16.
- 85.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Mineola, 2010), 217.
- 86.
Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 28.
- 87.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 127.
- 88.
J. Huizinga, ‘The Task of Cultural History’, in: idem, Men and Ideas, James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle transl. (Princeton, 1984), 17–76.
- 89.
Ibid., 39.
- 90.
Ibid. 47.
- 91.
Ibid., 49.
- 92.
Ibid., 48.
- 93.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 369.
- 94.
Ibid., 120–1.
- 95.
Huizinga, Men and Ideas, 55.
It is noticeable that Huizinga speaks here of a historical suggestion. There is one other occasion – in the article ‘The Historical Museum’ – that he mentions the notion of historical sensation, in this case also calling it a historical suggestion: ‘the historical museum should in the first place be subservient to this curious function of our mind, to this receptiveness to the immediate historical suggestion’ (my translation). (J. Huizinga, ‘Het Historisch Museum’, in: idem, Verzamelde Werken, vol. 2 (Haarlem, 1948), 559–69, there 566).
- 96.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 123, 124. With the ‘restriction of constructivism’ he refers to the idea that historical writing should be based on evidence.
- 97.
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. x (London, 1954), 103.
- 98.
Ibid., 98–112, 130–9.
- 99.
‘[T]he psychic event which had these momentous consequences’ (ibid., 103).
- 100.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 106, 121, 220, 252.
- 101.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Adam Phillips ed. (Oxford, 1998). Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer ed., Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews transl. (Cambridge, 2002), 128–59.
- 102.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 264.
- 103.
Ibid., 265.
- 104.
Ibid., 332.
- 105.
Ibid., 358.
- 106.
Ibid., 351.
- 107.
Ibid.
- 108.
Ibid.
- 109.
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke, 2007) analyses the cultural and social roots of its appeal, showing how fascist thought is aimed at giving shape to an alternative type of modernism in opposition to the ‘decadent’ tradition of the Enlightenment.
- 110.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Nisbet transl., 27.
- 111.
Ibid., 30.
- 112.
Ibid., 40.
- 113.
Ibid., 42.
- 114.
‘World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom – a progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend’ (ibid., 54).
- 115.
Ibid., 43.
- 116.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 352.
- 117.
Ibid.
- 118.
Ibid. 354.
- 119.
Ibid., 354–5.
- 120.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 351.
- 121.
More recently, however, several nations have ‘acknowledged’ that Turkey has indeed committed genocide on the Armenians in World War I. That this is considered a brave and exceptional stance only illustrates how unusual it is to recognize that the victors of history may be wrong.
- 122.
Uğur Ümit Üngör: The Making of Modern Turkey. Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford, 2011), 219.
- 123.
Ibid., 224.
- 124.
Ibid., 229.
- 125.
Ibid., 264.
- 126.
Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity. Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, 2003), 175.
- 127.
R. Peters, ‘Actes de présence. Presence in Fascist Political Culture’, History and Theory 45 (2006), 362–74, there 372.
- 128.
‘Geschichte [ist] die selbstgerechte Ichbezüglichkeit des Geistes, der aus Geschichte herausgeboren, zuletzt Geschichte als Vorstufe zu seiner eigenen Gegenwart begreift und die sehr notwendige Lebenskunst ausübt, unermessliche Untergange und Qualen (anderer) heroisch ertragen zu konnen’ (Theodor Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (Hamburg, 1962), 233.).
- 129.
John Watkins, ‘A Whiff of Hegel in The Open Society?’, in: Popper’s Open Society after 50 Years, Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong eds. (London, 1999), 97–107, there 99.
- 130.
Referring to Hegel’s example, Ankersmit maintains: ‘And so it is with all the other examples mentioned: Constitutive of the identity of contemporary Western man is his realization of being no longer part of a prerevolutionary, preindustrial, and still predominantly Christian Europe. To put it in one comprehensive formula: in all these cases, one has become what one is no longer – with all the emphasis on the “no longer”’ (Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 333).
- 131.
R.G. Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (London,1925). Reprint Bristol, 1994.
- 132.
Ibid., 33.
- 133.
Ibid., 34.
- 134.
‘[D]ivine providence is wisdom, coupled with infinite power (unendlicher Macht), which realises its ends, i.e. the absolute and rational design of the world’; ‘The question at issue is … the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the world, and which it is driven to realise incessantly and with irresistible power (mit absoluter Gewalt); ‘[T]he Idea of reason itself, philosophy should help us to understand that the actual world is as it ought to be. It shows us that the rational will, the concrete good is indeed all-powerful (das Mächtigste), and that this absolute power (absolute Macht) translates itself into reality. The true good, the universal and divine reason, also has the power to fulfil its own purpose, and the most concrete representation of this goodness and reason is God’ (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Nisbet transl., 35, 63, 66–7).
- 135.
‘My theory is a theory against theory – although I am well aware of the painful irony of the fact that a profoundly theoretical book is needed for this rejection of theory’ (Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 263–4).
- 136.
Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 36.
- 137.
Ibid., 43.
- 138.
K.R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 2 (London, 1966), 22.
- 139.
The term historicism has brought about much confusion, since Popper did not realize that the term was already used as translation of the German Historismus, which has a different meaning. The latter concept is also translated as ‘historism’. For a brief outline of the issue, see Van der Dussen, History as a Science, 48–9.
- 140.
Popper, Open Society and its Enemies, 269.
- 141.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox transl. (Oxford, 1967), 216 (§ 340). See also note 134, where Hegel says that ‘the actual world is as it ought to be’.
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van der Dussen, J. (2016). A Quest for the Real Past. Ankersmit on Historiography and (Sublime) Historical Experience. In: Studies on Collingwood, History and Civilization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20672-1_10
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