Wesleyan University

Reply to Professor Iggers Author(s): F. R. Ankersmit Reviewed work(s): Source: History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Oct., 1995), pp. 168-173 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505619 . Accessed: 23/01/2012 13:05
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

REPLY TO PROFESSOR

IGGERS

F. R. ANKERSMIT

ABSTRACT Professor Iggers's main target in his critique of my essay is my preference for the historicist over the Enlightenment conception of the past. I agree with Iggers that in contemporary historical theory and contemporary philosophy of language many effective arguments against historicism can be found. I argue, however, that these arguments lose much of their cogency if we recognize that the historicist notion of "the historical idea" can be redefined to satisfy both the requirements of actual historical practice and contemporary philosophy of language. The main task of the contemporary theoretician is not to reject historicism but to recognize and to discover its intellectual riches, and to repair it whenever and wherever necessary.

I am well aware that in this discussion with Professor Iggers far more issues are addressed than I could possibly deal with in this reply. This is all the more the case since every reader of Iggers's The German Conception of History, which after twenty-five years is still the most authoritative and convincing account of nineteenth-century historicism, will be profoundly aware of all the moral, political, historical, and theoretical implications of each discussion of historicism that he so eruditely expounded in this book. Moreover, because of Iggers's background in both the German and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of historical thought, and because of his active participation in present discussions about the proper aims of historical writing in his many publications since his historicism book, each of these aspects of historicism will resonate in what he says about it. His discussion partner must therefore have sufficiently sensitive ears to be able to hear all these resonances. In short, whoever discusses historicism will inevitably discuss history tout court; never is this more true than in a discussion with such a distinguished authority on historicism as Georg Iggers. I will deal in the remainder of this reply exclusively with our disgreements with regard to historicism. Most of Iggers's criticism of what I have said about contemporary historical writing, especially about its unpolitical character, I am willing to accept. Iggers's main critique of my essay is that my claim that Enlightenment historical writing is modelled on the ontology of the statement and historicism on that of the text is contradicted by the tendency of Ranke (and other historicists)

REPLY TO PROFESSOR IGGERS

169

to see states as substances preserving their identity through historical change. Though I will show below that there certainly is much truth in Iggers's critique, I believe it does insufficient justice to the complexity of the problems involved in the transition from the Enlightenment to historicism. In the final analysis, at stake in this transition is the notion of the subject of change, that is, the question of the (onto-)logical nature of the entity to which change is ascribed when historical change occurs. As I have argued in Narrative Logic we are naturally inclined to model change on Ovidian metamorphosis, that is, we believe that in the changing thing is some essence that remains unchanged during change and that is the obvious candidate to count as the "subject of change.''1 Most contemporary accounts of change are variants of this intuitively satisfying conception of change. It is so plausible because what I referred to in my essay as "the ontology of the statement" is so natural to us. Precisely because of its very obviousness the Enlightenment did not hesitate to accept it as its model for historical change. The Enlightenment's proto-positivist conception of the past, its affinities with the ideal of "history as a social science" (so justly pointed out by the Bielefelders), and its conception of historical causality2 all bear witness to the Enlightenment's acceptance of this account of change. Mannheim's and Meinecke's claim that historicism has been one of the major revolutions in Western thought is correct. Historicism had the amazing courage to break with the Enlightenment account of change that seems so trivially and obviously true. If it was Galileo's greatness to hold onto something so completely at odds with our daily experience of reality as his law of inertia, it was the historicist's greatness to have argued the no less counterintuitive thesis that change is a construction of the mind. Historicists came to this conclusion because they realized that historical change does not merely involve the contingent properties of a historical entity but its very essence as well; this realization forced them to abandon the belief in some unchanging essence that might function as the historical object's "subject of change." It follows that the "subject of change" is not to be identified with some unchanging substance which made a thing what it is, but with the historical account that is given of historical change. And since this historical account consists of a set of statements, this necessarily effected the transition from the ontology of the statement to the ontology of the set of statements. Admittedly this is only a reconstruction of the historicist's argument ex post facto and therefore only part of the truth. Nevertheless, this reconstruction will enable me to indicate where I agree and where I disagree with Iggers and for what reasons. Obviously, then, we could not expect of historicists the philosophical sophistication required to be fully aware of all the (onto-)logical implications of the
1. This is why I referred to the Ovidian conception of change by the term "essentialism." See my Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language (The Hague, 1983), 120134, and especially 121. 2. So well expounded in Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975).

170

F. R. ANKERSMIT

intellectual revolution effected by them. More specifically, instead of wholeheartedly accepting the thoroughly nominalist account of historical change that I gave just now (that is, by locating the "subject of change" in language and not in reality), historicists tended to make a stop halfway between (Enlightenment) essentialism and the nominalist acccount of change that is more in harmony with our contemporary philosophical conceptions. The question then arises, how did they manage to develop such an intermediary position? This is where the notion of the "historical idea," which is the logical heart of historicism, comes in. According to the historicists the "historical idea" of a nation, state, people, and so on was its essence, an essence which would enable the historian to explain and to understand its historical evolution. On the one hand this essence was quite unlike the essence of the Enlightenment's historical ontology. It is rather a kind of Aristotelian entelechy, a principle inherent in the things themselves that causes them to pass through a certain historical evolution. As such it could not be identified with any set of unchanging properties of a changing thing that had always been the Enlightenment's subject of change. This is where historicism was revolutionary and why I argued that the historicist's notion of the historical idea has been the major revolution in the whole history of historical writing. But on the other hand historicists could not resist the temptation to reify this new and more sophisticated subject of change, conceiving the historical idea, this entelechy, as something lying in past reality itself. So, according to historicists, historical reality is peopled not just with changing things and historical accounts of these changes, but with three things: historical phenomena, historical accounts, and "historical ideas" which, in some way or other, determine historical phenomena. This was the reactionary part of the historicists' argument that caused them to get stuck somewhere between the Enlightenment and the nominalist account of historical change. But we cannot accept the historicist account of historical change as it stands: the notion of the "historical idea" is an obvious candidate for Occam's razor. The historicists were not aware of this themselves since in the heady idealist intellectual climate of Germany at the beginning of the last century long ontological beards were the fashion rather than frowned upon. But we need to rethink the implications of the historicist's account of change and to amend it where this proves to be necessary from the point of view of contemporary philosophy. As I already suggested above and have more fully argued in Narrative Logic, doing this involves removing the historical idea from the domain of historical reality itself, locating it instead in the historical text. In short, what was still reactionary and metaphysical in historicism must now be recognized as being part of the historian's language. What should not be done, however, is to abandon the notion of the historical idea merely because of the historicists' insufficient theoretical justification of it. A modernized notion of the historical idea is the primary and indispensable logical instrument for understanding the writing of history.3
3. The historical idea is crucial for understanding not just historicist historical writing. A theory of the typification of narrative substances can also explain how the Enlightenment's conception

REPLY TO PROFESSOR IGGERS

171

Hence Iggers is right when he observes that the Enlightenment and historicism shared a propensity towards reification, but he fails to observe that reification served a different purpose in each case, and that the historicists reified a "subject of change" that is essentially different from that of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment saw no real ontological difference between chairs and tables on the one hand, and a nation or people on the other; historicism reified the entelechy, the principle of historical change, supposed to inhere in nations, peoples, and so on. This is a difference of far more than merely technical significance. The Enlightenment's reification resulted in a historical reality constituted by entities that essentially remain the same - hence the stiffness and woodenness of Enlightenment historical writing if compared to the subtle flexibility of historicism. Historicist reification posed no limits to historical change since entelechy leaves room for all the historical change that the historian might ever wish to see in (or to project onto) the past. It is here, then, that we may discern the (onto-)logical liberation that made historicism possible and, speaking more generally, the dramatic historicization of notions of culture and society that is so characteristic of most of nineteenth-century thought. This brings me to the closely related issues of rhetoric and of objectivity. Notice, to begin with, that the ontology of the statement reduces historical interpretation and explanation to the domain of the merely contingently true. As a chair may have or not have a certain color, certain damages, and so on without becoming a different chair, so the objects of Enlightenment historical investigation have no essential relationship with the historical changes they undergo. As Enlightenment historians very well realized themselves (as has been emphasized by Muhlack4), because of this conception of change historical knowledge could never be more than merely "probable." Another conclusion that results from this state of affairs and that Enlightenment historians were no less ready to accept (as was emphasized by Gossman5), was that rhetoric is essential in the historian's representation of the past. For if our knowledge of the past is merely "probable" (in the sense originally meant by Aristotle and not as in contemporary statistics), much will depend on historians' rhetorical talent to convince their audience of the correctness of their argument. This may explain the at first sight unlikely alliance of natural-law philosophy and of rhetoric in Enlightenment historical writing that was the point of departure of my essay.
of (the) change of (historical) objects can be derived from the historicist conception. This is an argument in favor of the historicist's paradigm if one accepts MacIntyre's proposal that in a disagreement between alternative Kuhnian paradigms the paradigm to be preferred is the one from which its competitor can be derived. See A. MacIntyre, "The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past," in Philosophy in History, ed. R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, Eng., 1984). 4. See U. Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft hn Humanismus und der Aufkldrung: die Vorgeschichte des Historismus (Munich, 1991). 5. See L. Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), especially chapters 7 and 8.

172

F. R. ANKERSMIT

All this changed with the historicists' abandonment of the ontology of the statement. Now the central role in the logic of historical representation is no longer played by historical things or objects existing in a historical reality (in the way that Napoleon or the statue of Marcus Aurelius can properly be said to be such things), but by the historical idea that they believed to inhere in it without being the thing itself. Moreover, since within the historicists'- admittedly peculiar-idealist metaphysics the historical idea really was an idea (no less than part of historical reality), the historian's reproduction of the historical idea could, in the end, be a perfect copy of the original. The historian's job according to the historicist is to provide a textual "mimesis" of the historical idea. So instead of the merely "probable" knowledge of the past provided by Enlightenment historical writing, the historicist might now even claim for historical knowledge the kind of certainty that is provided by the analytically true statement.6 The main conditions for achieving a perfect copy are: 1) sufficient familiarity with the sources; and 2) the avoidance of rhetoric (since historical objectivity requires a total epistemological abstention on behalf of the historian). If and only if these conditions are satisfied can an objective and true account of the past be given by the historian. Once again: I completely agree with Iggers when he wishes to denounce the theoretical flaws in the historicist conceptions. We now know that the past does not contain both historical phenomena and a historical idea that caused them to be what they were. We now know that the historicists' historical idea was a product of their own minds,7 that it has no existence outside the language used for representing the past. We can now claim, with Iggers, that historicist historians were no less rhetorical than their Enlightenment predecessors and, with White, that they unwittingly embraced the "rhetoric of anti-rhetoric."8 We now have no difficulty in finding where the historicists sinned against their professed objectivism. But we should never forget that all these perfectly justified criticisms are the proud declarations of a later generation having little difficulty in identifying the philosophical mistakes of its ancestors. Nor, more importantly, should we forget that what we now condemn as philosophical naivete in the historicists' conceptions enabled them both to discover hitherto unsuspected riches in our cultural past and to describe these with an assurance and self-confidence that neither Enlightenment historians nor their contemporary colleagues could bring to this task. (Similarly, we may now condemn the philosophy of Bacon and Descartes as a hopeless muddle of mistakes, confu6. As I argued in Narrative Logic the statements contained by a historical narrative can all be analytically derived from its "narrative substance," which is the philosophically more up-to-date variant of the historicist's entelechy, or "historical idea." In the last chapter of this book a justification is given for the Popperian claim (questioned by Iggers) of why the riskiest metaphorical interpretation of the past is the best interpretation. 7. As Goethe with his historical acumen, so rightly praised by Meinecke, already saw: "Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,/ Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,/ In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln." (Faust I, 577-579) 8. H. White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987), 66.

REPLY TO PROFESSOR IGGERS

173

sions, and fallacies from the perspective of contemporary analytical philosophy and philosophy of science; nevertheless, it was under the banner of this philosophical mess that modern science succeeded in unravelling the mysteries of physical reality.) Perhaps this may indicate the real difference between Iggers and me. I do not object to Iggers's picture of what one might call the "surface phenomena" of the historicist's historical text -everything he says about this seems true and convincing to me; nor do I feel tempted to defend the historicists' idealist metaphysics. Where I differ with Iggers is whether there is "some method in the apparent madness" of historicism (as there was in that of Bacon and Descartes) and whether finding out about this will not only make unambiguously clear why historicist historical writing was so much superior to that of the Enlightenment, but also why historicism can still teach us a few things. That much confusion besets historicist historical theory I shall be the first to concede, but this is not the end of the story. It would only be the end of the story if one accepted the typical Enlightenment assumption that we may put aside a belief as soon as we have identified a mistaken argument in it. I would prefer the historicist's intuition that it is context that determines how harmful an argumentative mistake actually is. From the same historicist perspective I am immediately prepared to concede that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the Enlightenment's ontology of the statement: the ontology is completely self-consistent and historians can work with it if they want to, just as the geometrician can get by with Euclid's axioms. But as Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry made possible insights that Euclidean geometry can never yield, so were Bachofen, Burckhardt, Huizinga (and all who came after them down to the present day) only possible after the historicist revolution. So, in the end, the real difference between Iggers and me may well be that he prefers the Enlightenment paradigm while I prefer the historicist one. That would imply that neither of us can argue his case without inevitably getting caught in a vicious circle. And, as formal logic has taught us, this is both what we may expect when a discussion becomes as fundamental as is the case here and why vicious circles need not always so be so unproductive as is customarily believed. University of Groningen