Ankersmit on Linguistic Transcendentalism and Historical Experience
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 20 March 2024 is the 79th birthday of Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit (born 20 March 1945), who was born in Deventer, the Netherlands, on this date in 1945. Every episode so far has considered individuals already deceased, but Frank Ankersmit is still very much alive.
As a living philosopher of history, Ankersmit’s work is enmeshed in contemporary concerns, and we can recognize in his work the most recent controversies in philosophy of history and the heritage of contemporary philosophy. He engages with the work of Arthur Danto (known for the logic of narrative sentences), Hayden White (known for literary theory and the linguistic turn), Erich Auerbach (known for mimetic theory), and Jörn Rüsen (known for conceptual history), inter alia. His 1981 doctoral dissertation was titled Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. Ankersmit eventually shifted from the language of narrative to that of representation, and historical representation came to be a major theme of his thought.
In the preface to his Sublime Historical Experience, Ankersmit discusses the ambiguity around “narrativism,” which invited comparison with literary theory and suggested the reduction of historical narratives to equivalence with fictional narratives, which motivated his use of “representation” instead of “narrative.” The conflation of historical narrative with literary narrative has been compounded by work like that of Hayden White, which could be called philosophy of history, but might also be called literary theory, or literary theory as applied to history. Ankersmit identifies White with the “linguistic turn” in historical theory. Chapter 9 of Ankersmit’s book on historical representation is titled “Hayden White’s Appeal to the Historians,” and it begins with a sketch of historians’ suspicions of philosophy of history:
“…historians feel more insecure about the scientific status of their discipline than the practitioners of any other field of scholarly research. They are painfully aware that historical debate rarely leads to conclusive results and that such regrettable things as intellectual fashions or political preference may strongly color their opinions about the past. In short, deep in their hearts historians know that, in spite of all their emphasis on the duties of accurate investigation of sources and of prudent and responsible interpretation, history ranks lowest of all the disciplines that are taught at a university.”
Ankersmit’s account of the war between historians and philosophers of history is quite funny at times, and makes this chapter really enjoyable. He goes on to say:
“…no historical theorist has been more influential in introducing the linguistic turn in historical theory than Hayden White, and it need not surprise us therefore that White became a favorite object of historians’ ire. Since the publication of White’s Metahistory historians — from Gertrude Himmelfarb at one end of the spectrum of historical writing to Carlo Ginzburg at the opposite end — have fulminated against White and condemned his views as a dangerous and irresponsible caricature of what historical writing actually is.”
While historians have found this subversive, Ankersmit rightly points out the White has been criticized for doing exactly what he denies. Such charges are the common fare of intellectual disputes, and especially when traditional genres of scholarship are challenged by upstarts, and this is what we have in the collision between traditional history and the linguistic turn in historical theory. Here Ankersmit summarizes the mischaracterization of White’s views by some historians:
“White demonstrates not that it is impossible to get hold of past reality, but the naiveté of the kind of positivist intuition customarily cherished in the discipline for how to achieve this goal. More specifically, what these positivist intuitions proudly present as historical reality itself is a mere spectral illusion that is created by the historical discipline itself. Surely, there is a historical reality that is, in principle, accessible to the historian. But historians have forgotten about this historical reality and mistaken the product of their tropological encodation of the past for the past itself. Within this reading, not the practicing historian criticizing White but White himself is the realist who reminds us of the difference between reality and mere intellectual construction.”
Ankersmit uses the evocative image of a seventeenth century formal garden as being what history has become in response to accepted canons of scientific history — tamed and shaped to conform to a human ideal, rather than showing us wild (historical) nature. Ankersmit quotes Hayden White quoting an 1801 essay of Friedrich Schiller in which Schiller calls history a sublime object. The quote from Schiller comes from his essay “On the Sublime”
“In the same manner as for the observant traveller, the strange wildness of nature is so attractive in physical nature — thus, and for the same reason, every soul capable of enthusiasm finds even in the regrettable anarchy found in the moral world a source of singular pleasure. Without doubt he who sees the grand economy of nature only from the impoverished light of the understanding; he who has never any other thought than to reform its defiant disorder and to substitute harmony, such a one could not find pleasure in a world which seems given up to the caprice of chance rather than governed according to a wise ordination, and where merit and fortune are for the most part in opposition. He desires that the whole world throughout its vast space should be ruled like a house well regulated; and when this much-desired regularity is not found, he has no other resource than to defer to a future life, and to another and better nature, the satisfaction which is his due, but which neither the present nor the past afford him. On the contrary, he renounces willingly the pretension of restoring this chaos of phenomena to one single notion; he regains on another side, and with interest, what he loses on this side. Just this want of connection, this anarchy, in the phenomena, making them useless to the understanding, is what makes them valuable to reason. The more they are disorderly the more they represent the freedom of nature. In a sense, if you suppress all connection, you have independence. Thus, under the idea of liberty, reason brings back to unity of thought that which the understanding could not bring to unity of notion. It thus shows its superiority over the understanding, as a faculty subject to the conditions of a sensuous order. When we consider of what value it is to a rational being to be independent of natural laws, we see how much man finds in the liberty of sublime objects as a set-off against the checks of his cognitive faculty. Liberty, with all its drawbacks, is everywhere vastly more attractive to a noble soul than good social order without it — than society like a flock of sheep, or a machine working like a watch. This mechanism makes of man only a product; liberty makes him the citizen of a better world. It is only thus viewed that history is sublime to me. The world, as a historic object, is only the strife of natural forces; with one another and with man’s freedom. History registers more actions referable to nature than to free will; it is only in a few cases, like Cato and Phocion, that reason has made its power felt. If we expect a treasury of knowledge in history how we are deceived! All attempts of philosophy to reconcile what the moral world demands with what the real world gives is belied by experience, and nature seems as illogical in history as she is logical in the organic kingdoms. But if we give up explanation it is different. Nature, in being capricious and defying logic, in pulling down great and little, in crushing the noblest works of man, taking centuries to form — nature, by deviating from intellectual laws, proves that you cannot explain nature by nature’s laws themselves, and this sight drives the mind to the world of ideas, to the absolute.”
History as a sublime object breaks down our rationalistic expectations and drives us to the absolute — which I guess in this context means naïve (non-cognitive) historical experience. We are freed from the prisonhouse of language, Ankersmit writes:
“So let us throw open the windows of this narrow and stuffy room that we have been living in for the last fifty years — and let us breathe again the fresh air of the outside world! This may seem — to echo Putnam — a plea for a re-infantilization of our reflection about the nature and the purpose of historical writing. Perhaps it is — but it may, at times, be necessary (and even demand the greatest effort) to regain something of the child’s innocent naiveté and to be wholly open to what the world has to offer us.”
Historical experience as manifesting the sublime (somewhat similar to the sense of the sublime in the Schiller quote above) became another important theme for Ankersmit, whose book Sublime Historical Experience sets up a distinction between linguistic transcendentalism and historical experience. Linguistic transcendentalism is the motivating spirit of the linguistic turn, which we saw that Ankersmit discussed in the context of Hayden White’s Metahistory. Ankersmit doesn’t really offer explicit definitions of either linguistic transcendentalism or historical experience, or, rather, doesn’t offer sententiously encapsulated definitions; there is a sense in which the entire book is the exposition of the concept of historical experience, so we have to pick up Ankersmit’s intended meaning from the context.
In Sublime Historical Experience, Ankersmith says that Richard Rorty did the most to undermine linguistic transcendentalism, but at the same time he Rorty ultimately gave in to it. Ankersmit quotes Rorty’s slogan that “language goes all the way down,” and the concomitant idea that there is no experience without language, or, we might say, there is no language-independent experience. In an interview with Jonathan Menezes published in Journal of Philosophy of History in 2017 Ankersmit says:
“…the idea then was that the linguistic transcendentalism of contemporary philosophy of language robs experience of its autonomy. As we saw, according to Rorty’s slogan ‘language goes all the way down’, experience can only enter the scene if accompanied by language; it can therefore never be more than the obedient slave of language and only what language permits it to be.”
This critique of linguistic transcendentalism only makes sense — i.e., one only understands why it is being critiqued at such length — knowing how pervasive the linguistic turn in philosophy has been, and the extent to which it has transformed philosophy in the past century. The criticism of linguistic transcendentalism must be seen against the background of twentieth century philosophy, whether in the early forms of the linguistic philosophy of logical positivism, the mid-century ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Ryle, to which I referred in the episode on Patrick Gardiner, or in its continental manifestations, such as in Heidegger after his linguistic turn, or Foucault or Derrida.
Philosophy as an institution was and is heavily invested in linguistic transcendentalism of one form or another. Ankersmit engages in this critique in order to highlight historical experience as contrasted to linguistic transcendentalism, and of historical experience Ankersmit writes in Sublime Historical Experience:
“Historical experience involves, in the first place, a Gestalt-switch from a timeless present into a world consisting of things past and present. This gives us the discovery of the past as a reality that has somehow ‘broken off’ from a timeless present. This is ‘the moment of loss.’ But at the same time historical experience aims at a recovery of the past by transcending again the barriers between past and present. And this could be characterized as ‘the moment of desire or of love.’ All of historical writing is to be situated in the space enclosed by these complementary movements of the discovery (loss) and the recovery of the past (love) that constitute together the realm of historical experience. Past and present are related to each other as man and wife in Plato’s myth of the origin of the sexes… The sublimity of historical experience originates from this paradoxical union of the feelings of loss and love, that is, of the combination of pain and pleasure in how we relate to the past.”
This is a pretty abstract way of talking about historical experience. Further along in the book, I found a passage that makes it more concrete:
“Huizinga had his historical experiences when looking at paintings of the Van Eycks or of Rogier van der Weijden. Bachofen had his when entering an Etruscan burial chamber. For Goethe and Mario Praz a historical experience could be provoked by a piece of furniture or a room that was left unchanged for centuries, and Herder, Prescott, and Burckhardt had theirs when assisting at the enactment of an ancient ritual or when looking at a certain city scene. It seems to be a perfectly reasonable assumption that in these objects a[n]… aura of the past itself has been preserved all through the centuries and that the subject of the historical experience suddenly becomes aware of it. Put differently, in such cases the past itself can be said to have survived the centuries and to be still present in objects that are given to us here and now, such as paintings, burial chambers, pieces of furniture, and so on.”
This makes sense to me, as I have had experiences like this, and probably most of us have had experiences like this. One could even say that museums and historical preservation each in their own way attempt to show us objects that can convey historical experiences in just this way. Most European nation-states have open-air museums, sometimes called ethnography museums or museums of rural life (the first being Skansen in Stockholm), where they have collected and preserved the material culture of past life.
In a few cases, original structures have been preserved in their original locations and essentially in their original condition. Many years ago I visited the Black Forest Open Air Museum Vogtsbauernhof with an original farm from 1612, and which had been lived in by the last owners up to 1965. In places like this, one can be immersed in the past, and one can have historical experiences in which one could say that the past itself has survived and is still present in the objects. Being able to immerse oneself in an environment like this is a kind of methodology of generating historical experiences, and this is one of the reasons we travel. Travel more than anything else made me aware of history.
Historical experience in this sense strikes me as a not uncommon experience, and we might even call it a familiar feature of the world. For Ankersmit, such historical experience is tied to historical consciousness.
“I invite the reader of this book to enter the dark and sometimes even sinister Romantic world of the profoundest and quasi-existentialist layers in our relationship to the past — a dimension of historical consciousness that had effectively been filtered out by the transcendentalism and cognitivism of ‘theory,’ although I shall be the first to admit that, just like it was two centuries ago, one can only get to Romanticism after first having passed through rationalism and ‘theory.’ In this way the book will remain tributary to ‘theory’ and the linguistic rationalism that it criticizes and wishes to transcend.”
As with Wittgenstein, one can cast away the ladder after having climbed up it, but one must first have the ladder and use it. For Ankersmit, historical theory, and especially the linguistic turn of historical theory, is the ladder that we climb, and, when we have climbed up it, there we find historical experiences. At that point, presumably, we can cast away the ladder and enjoy historical experiences on their own terms. But between the two — between linguistic transcendentalism and historical experience — it seems there can be no compromise:
“An important theme running through all of the present study is the incompatibility of language and experience, as the latter word is understood here. No compromise is possible between language and experience, and the triumphs of the one are inevitably the defeats of the other. They truly are each other’s mortal enemies: Where you have language, experience is not, and vice versa. We have language in order not to have experience and to avoid the fears and terrors that are typically provoked by experience; language is the shield protecting us against the terrors of a direct contact with the world as conveyed by experience. Language presents us with an image of the world, but as such it can offer only a shadow of the terrors inhabiting the world itself and of the fears that it may provoke. Language, the symbolic order, enables us to escape the perplexities of a direct confrontation with the world as it is given us in experience.”
I should mention that Sublime Historical Experience has long discussions of Rorty and Gadamer. These are two philosophers I haven’t read, so I’m not sufficiently informed to comment on them, but expositions and criticisms of Rorty and Gamader constitute the bulk of the work.
Ankersmit also makes interesting use of Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it like to be a bat?” and this is something I have read and which interests me. For Ankersmit, Nagel’s question is the problem of historical experience taken to an extreme.
“All the questions that the historist… always likes to ask about the accessibility to the historians of how people in the past experienced their world present themselves most starkly when we ask ourselves, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ The bridge we have to cross in order to be able to answer the question ‘What was it like to be a peasant in Montaillou?’ will certainly be an infinitely simpler and less pretentious construction than the one that will bring us to the experience of what it is like to be a bat. So all the problems that historism pretended to deal with will fully make themselves felt with the problem that Nagel put on the philosopher’s agenda.”
Ankersmit particularly wants to play Nagel’s question off against Rorty’s linguistic response to it. Ankersmit quotes this from Rorty:
“Reflection on what it is to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in human language.”
And then comments:
“Rorty categorically rejects this possibility of prelinguistic experience (with the sole exception of pain as being prelinguistic); and his conclusion is therefore that Nagel asked himself a meaningless question, since it leads to this absurdity of prelinguistic experience and thus to a profoundly mistaken view of the relationship between language and reality… If Rorty is right in asserting that the problem raised by Nagel is a non-problem, it will be impossible for him to perceive the problems raised by traditional historism with even the strongest philosophical microscope.”
This was an interesting connection to make, as I haven’t anywhere else previously seen Nagel’s paper mentioned in the context of philosophy of history.
While Ankersmit does not use the language of phenomenology, in his pursuit of a non-cognitive historical experience, he is engaged in the phenomenological project of trying to get at the things themselves, as Husserl put it. Also, Ankersmit’s pursuit of naïve historical experience, that he worries may be a kind of infantilization, resembles a quote I have mentioned previously, from the end of Husserl’s life, when Husserl expressed his hope that he had at last become a genuine beginner. Sometimes a cultivated naïveté is an achievement.
These parallels suggest some thematic motives in common between Ankersmit’s work and a phenomenological philosophy of history. Historical experience as Ankersmit describes it also resembles William James’ conception of pure experience. So in a conceptual map of history, which I have mentioned in several episodes, Ankersmit’s philosophy of history would intersect both phenomenology and a philosophy of history that could be derived from William James.
