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Abstract
Do historians (of education) need philosophy? The paper suggests that historians do not need philosophical doctrine or (meta‐)theory, or philosophical method, but that in so far as historians (as Koselleck states) are “writing their own time anew” and are “rewriting the past” (and so enlighten their present), they might find some help in a particular philosophical ethos: an ethos of discomfort or “attentive study”. First, how Koselleck describes the price that (famous) historians have paid for writing their own time anew and for rewriting the past will be sketched. This price entails, as will be argued, an uncomfortable exposition and estrangement of the researcher or writer. It is then suggested that such exposition and estrangement is also what is at stake in the ethos of a particular philosophical tradition implying exercises or askēsis of uncomfortable exposition (or attentive study). This ethos will be sketched following Foucault, calling himself a “historian of the present”, not in order to intervene in the many controversies amongst historians surrounding his work but in order to support the initial suggestion that philosophy might be of some help for historians. Moreover the article will indicate how philosophy in this sense is intrinsically an educational endeavour (philosophy as education or paideia), although not an issue of learning (acquiring knowledge or competence).
Notes
1 R. Martin, “Do Historians Need Philosophy? (Review of “The logic of history: putting postmodernism in perspective” by C. Behan McCullagh),” History and Theory 45 (2006): 252–260.
2 R. Martin, “Do Historians…”, 252. Rorty declares similarly regarding education: “I am dubious about the relevance of philosophy to education.” R. Rorty, “The dangers of over‐philosophication: Reply to Arcilla and Nicholson,” Educational Theory 40 (1990): 41.
3 Martin, “Do Historians …,” 255.
4 Ibid., 253.
5 Ibid., 260.
6 Ibid., 257.
7 Reinhart Koselleck, “Transformations of experience and methodological change,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Others, foreword Hayden White (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 79.
8 For a discussion of this notion of experience in a way which is relevant to the present essay, see M. Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
9 Koselleck,. “Transformations of experience …”.
10 Ibid., 46 (emphasis added).
11 Ibid., 46.
12 Ibid., 77.
13 Ibid., 67.
14 Ibid., 66.
15 Ibid., 78–79.
16 Ibid., 79–80.
17 Ibid., 75.
18 Ibid., 83.
19 Ibid., 76.
20 Ibid., 77.
21 Ibid., 78.
22 Ibid., 77.
23 Ibid., 80.
24 Ibid., 78.
25 Ibid., 76.
26 Ibid., 81.
27 Ibid., 83.
28 It is obviously not the need for a counter‐history to which Koselleck is pointing here. And of course Foucault’s work “had an undeniable appeal for those who wanted … to hear the voices of history’s excluded … and to attend the unsaid”. Catherine Gallagher and S. Greenblatt, Practising New Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 67; see also Foucault’s own remarks on the “savoirs assujettis” in the first course of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1976: Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société. Cours au collège de France. 1976, (Society must be defended. The Collège Courses. 1976) ed. Mauro Bertani and Allesandro Fontana (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997). But the point of Koselleck here is entirely different. However, Gallagher and Greenblatt also indicate that, even as “counterhistorian”, Foucault wrote from a special “position”, which had to do with a particular personal involvement: “Foucault’s rhetoric of personal involvement stood out from that of other counterhistorians, first, by the sheer complexity of his account of the relation between himself and his anecdotes, and, second, because of the impossibility of that relation ever seeming satisfying or reassuring.” It was related to “a heightened sense of being on the extremities of the historically knowable, at the very edge of what we could know, cognitively, about the past” (ibid. 70–71). And, referring to Foucault’s disturbing experience and his uneasiness reading Borges (see the opening of The Order of Things), they outline how “this queasy encounter with ultimate disorder, this thinking in extremis, turns out to be the dread that often drives disciplines toward the discovery of new orders, which are always apprehended, or intuited, in the interstices of the given cognitive grid … by emitting flashes of a horrific outside to any conceivable historical order, [it] puts one beside oneself, momentarily beyond a merely cognitive relation to one’s task” (ibid. 72) (emphasis added).
29 J. Sharpe, “History from below,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 25–42.
30 Koselleck, “Transformation of experience…,” 76.
31 See quote in note 27.
32 Koselleck, “Transformation of experience…,” 78
33 Ibid., 82
34 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France. 1981–1982, ed. Fréderic. Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 27.
39 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 17.
35 Foucault also uses the term “spiritual tradition”. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15ff.
36 We refer to Fearless Speech (1983) and the lectures of Foucault: Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France 1982–1983, (The government of self and others: The Collège courses 1982–1983) recordings housed at the Institut de Mémoires de L’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC–Caen), 1983; Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Cours au Collège de France 1983–1984, (The courage of truth: The Collège courses 1983–1984) recordings housed at the Institut de Mémoires de L’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC–Caen) 1984; Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, in Ethics. Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. I. ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York/ London, Penguin, 1997), 303–320.
37 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject…
38 This is the tradition that Martin is referring to when he is speaking of philosophy as a second‐order reflection. See above.
42 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15 (emphasis added).
40 Ibid., 275.
41 Michel Foucault, L’hermeneutique du sujet. Cours au collège de France. 1981–1982, (The Hermeneutics of the Subject. The Collège courses 1981–1982) ed. Fréderic Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001).
43 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15–16.
44 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Vol.2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Viking, 1986), 9.
45 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15.
46 Wittgenstein: “Work in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one asks of it).” In: L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G.H. Von Wright (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman), trans. Peter Winch, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 16. And see of course also the work of Pierre Hadot: Pierre Hadot, Qu’est‐ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). See also the historical work of Ian Hunter inspired by this idea: Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ian Hunter, “The history of theory,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 78–112; Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter, The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
47 “But, then, what is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? … It was a philosophical exercise. The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” Ibid., 8–9.
48 Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. A. Davidson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 157.
49 Philippe Artières, “Dire l’actualité. Le travail de diagnostic chez Michel Foucault,” in Foucault. Le courage de la vérité, (The courage of truth) ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Puf, 2002), 23. We could say that the main objective here is not to achieve historical truth and thereby produce knowledge. The purpose is to transform the subject engaged in historical and philosophical thinking. So it is not about correspondence with a past, but about trying to bring into existence a new reality, to invent new possibilities. The past is read through the lens of a present situation. This point would be worth further investigation since in all the examples of great historians Koselleck offers these historians are related to the political situation of their time, and as we know Foucault related what he called the ethics of the self, the work on the self, as the only point of resistance to political power – as inventions of freedom.
50 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est‐ce que les Lumières?” in Dits et écrits, Vol II: 1977–1988, ed. D. Defert, F. Ewald and J. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1389.
51 Koselleck, “Transformation of experience…,” 46 (emphasis added).
52 Koselleck, “Transformation of experience…,” 46.
53 Michel Foucault, “Le souci de la vérité,” in Dits et écrits. Vol II: 1977–1988, ed. D. Defert, F. Ewald and J. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1494.
54 For example: “Je suis embarrasé de dire qu’au juste j’ai éprouvé lorsque j’ai lu ces fragments et bien d’autres qui leur étaient semblables. Sans doute l’une de ces impressions dont on dit qu’elles sont ‘physiques’, ….” Michel Foucault, “La vie des hommes infâmes,” in Dits et écrits, Vol II: 1977–1988, ed. D. Defert, F. Ewald and J. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 238. First published in Les Cahiers du chemin 29 (15 janvier 1977): 12–29. We can refer also to Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, for a discussion of the meaning of Foucault’s injunction to be open to the impact of experiencing material residues (i.e. bodily experiences) of the past as a rupture in the smooth workings of normal historicist narratives. This necessity of bodily experiences, thus, could function as a means to disturb the neutralising effect of contextualisation and normalisation upon experiences.
55 Philippe Artières, “Dire l’actualité. Le travail de diagnostic chez Michel Foucault,” in Foucault. Le courage de la vérité, (The courage of truth) ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Puf, 2002).
56 Michel De Certeau, “Le rire de Michel Foucault,” in Histoire et psychoanalyse entre science et fiction (History and psychoanalysis between science and fiction) (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 59.
57 Michel Foucault, “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–1984, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984/1989), 155.
58 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 282.
59 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 282. It would be interesting to investigate how for all the examples that Kosseleck gave of historians “writing their own time anew” (so enlightening their present), “the insights of lasting duration” they produced were, and maybe in the first place, ways “to ensure their freedom within the world”. We should thereby recall that freedom for Foucault does not mean “free will or right, but rather the capacity to invent new modes of living”, new possibilities; see also Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis. An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007, XXII). See also R, Fillion, “Freedom, Truth, and Possibility in Foucault’s Ethics,” Foucault Studies, 3 (2005): 50–64.
60 Michel Foucault, “The Use of Pleasure,” 11
61 See also: Michel Foucault, “For an Ethics of Discomfort,” in The Politics of Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1, ed S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth (New York: New Press, 1997). See also: Maarten Simons, Jan Masschelein and Kerlyn Quaghebeur, “The Ethos of Critical Research and the Idea of a Coming Research Community,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 37 (2005):817–832.
62 Michel Foucault, “Le monde est un grand asile,” in Dits et écrits, Vol. I: 1954–1975, ed. D Defert, F. Ewald and J. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1302.
63 Judit Revel, “La pensée vertical: une éthique de la problèmatisation,” in Foucault. Le courage de la vérité, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Puf, 2002), 85.
64 John Rajchman, The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
65 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23.
66 Hunter, Rival Enlightenments…, 21–22.
67 Martin, “Do Historians…,” 260.
68 Ibid., 257.
69 Koselleck, “Transformation of experience…,” 78.
70 Jay, Songs of Experience…, 259.
71 Koselleck, “Transformation of experience…,” 46 (emphasis added).
72 Let us point to one more indication which could support our claim that philosophy as we have understood it here, as an (active) uncomfortable practice of de‐privation (literally making public, bringing into play, i.e. being “present”) of the self, could be of help to (certain) historians. This indication is to be found in what Fabian, the well‐known ethnographer, writes about the “epistemological potential” of “being out of our minds” which he calls also experience or passion – as (active) drive and (passive) suffering – as a condition for knowledge and hence “objectivity”: “In our tradition passion has always been denounced as an impediment to reason. Yet, how else than by giving room in our theories of knowledge to passion – indeed, to terror and torture – can we hope to deal objectively with the peoples and cultures whom Western imperialism made the subjects of brutal domination as well as of ethnographic inquiry?” Fabian shows how extraordinary (physical!) states influenced by fever and fatigue (but also by opiates), states which imply the loss of control and losing one’s position, actually served to enhance the capacity for understanding and insight, contributing to substantial gains in ethnographic and anthropological knowledge. Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 32. See also: Johannes Fabian, Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).