Aftermaths of the dawn of experience: on the impact of Ankersmit’s sublime historical experience

Abstract

Historical experience is one of the most important topics of Frank Ankersmit’s work. As we shall see in this article, ‘historical experience’ in the Ankersmitean sense is a rare and complex kind of experience, entirely different from the experiences we have in our daily lives, because it presupposes that a historian can be in direct contact with a past that is long gone. But can we really experience the past? How could a historian perform this? As Ankersmit has admitted, this impractical and unusual choice of experience as one of his theoretical guides is controversial, to say the least, especially among scholars strongly oriented by the linguistic turn, narrativism, postmodernism, and so on, because he claims that experience should have priority over language. In this article, the aim is to investigate some of the effects or the aftermaths of what I term ‘the dawn of experience’ in current theory and philosophy of history. The aim is also to question whether this dawn of experience necessarily means banishing language or representation. In my view, it does not, and experience presupposes a suspension of language, not a complete abandonment of it.

Keywords:

• Historical experience
• historical representation
• Ankersmit
• Huizinga
• narrativism
• dissociation
• suspension of language

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Kalle Pihlainen for his remarkable work with the language of this article’s first draft. I also benefited from helpful comments made by Frank Ankersmit, Eugen Zelenak, Zoltan Boldizsar Simon, Peter P. Icke and the two anonymous reviewers. This does not mean, however, that they agree with the views expressed here. Some small pieces of this paper were previously published in a ‘short communication’ on the Arts and Humanities OAJ (1:3, 2017) and I thank the editors for allowing me to reuse them here.

Notes

1. Here is one of Ankersmit’s comments on this interaction between historicism and experience: ‘If we may infer that Ranke would have rejected historical experience from the fact that he never raised the issue in his numerous writings. On the other hand, it is admittedly true that Ranke asked the impossible of the historian when demanding with all the considerable rhetorical power available to him that he should ‘wipe himself out.’ Nevertheless, the very idea of the historian ‘wiping himself out’ – so that only the past itself can speak through his mouth – is not that far removed from the direct and immediate contact with the past promised by historical experience. So, perhaps Ranke was not so hostile to historical experience after all. To sum up, I don’t think there exists a necessary link between historicism and the notion of historical experience; nevertheless, historicists are probably more amenable to the notion than philosophers of history of other denominations.’ (Ankersmit and Menezes 2017, 273).

2. For further consideration of this topic, see, for example, Megill 2007, 17–59; and (more connected to the present discussion) Pihlainen 2014, 103–115.

3. It is true that Icke comments on the way that Leibnizian monadology influenced Ankersmit’s notion of ‘narrative substances’ but only in passing (see Icke 2012, 46–48). For a more detailed account of Ankersmit’s Leibnizianism, see Ankersmit and Tamm (2016, 491–511) and Fairbrother (2017, 59–82).

4. As to Danto, Ankersmit notes his importance in the preface of Sublime Historical Experience: ‘My debt to Arthur Danto is of a different kind: I came to the notion of historical experience by means of that of (historical) representation. And is there anything worth knowing about representation that does not have its antecedents in his oeuvre – an oeuvre that is unique in its combination of penetration and elegance?’ (Ankersmit 2005, xvii).