We are history: the outlines of a quasi-substantive philosophy of history

Abstract

In times of a felt need to justify the value of the humanities, the need to revisit and re-establish the public relevance of the discipline of history cannot come as a surprise. On the following pages I will argue that this need is unappeasable by scholarly proposals. The much desired revitalization of historical writing lies instead in reconciling ourselves with the dual meaning of the word history, in exploring the necessary interconnection between history understood as the course of events and as historical writing. Despite the general tendency of the last decades to forbid philosophizing about history in the former sense (at least in departments of history and philosophy), I think that to a certain extent we already do so without succumbing to substantive thought. We already have the sprouts of a speculative although only quasi-substantive philosophy of history that nevertheless takes seriously the postwar criticism of the substantive enterprise. In this essay I will first try to outline this quasi-substantive philosophy of history that attests to the historical sensibility of our times; and second, I will try to outline its consequences regarding history as historical writing. Finally, in place of a conclusion I will suggest that historical writing is not as much a contribution to public agendas as it is the very arena in which public life is at stake.

Keywords:

• Identity
• knowledge
• presence
• quasi-substantive philosophy of history
• disrupted singular
• the public relevance of history

Notes

1. The above picture, which characterizes the history of historical writing as a series of crises and in which current crisis-talk centers around the public weightlessness of the discipline, can, of course, be challenged. Nevertheless, what can hardly be denied is that talking about the public weightlessness of the discipline has been quite a common theme for some time. To be more accurate, it has been quite a common theme since White (1966), regarding which I can offer the following story. Whereas analytical philosophy of history was interested in ‘the special conceptual problems which arise out of the practice of history as well as out of substantive philosophy of history’ (Danto 1985, 1), and consequently, it remained indifferent to the question of the public relevance of historical writing, the Whitean narrativist approach aimed at the transformation of the discipline precisely on the grounds that it detected a public disinterest in, or even a disdain for, academic history. In order to restore the status of historical studies, White advised historians to keep up with ways of meaning constitution deployed by contemporary art and literary writing. As Whitean narrativism quickly superseded analytical philosophy of history in the 1970s (or at least in the 1980s) and came to dominance, its transformative spirit spread over the discipline while fusing with other lines of thought. At its most extreme, fused with postmodern theories, this transformative spirit took the shape of the suggestion that if historical writing cannot be transformed into something better, then we would do better to forget about it (Jenkins 1999). The transformative intentions, however, survived the demise of postmodern theories. Today, when there is a sense of a necessity to take stock of the theories of the last decades on the one hand (Partner 2009; Spiegel 2009), on the other hand the transformative intentions remain but take a very different shape, as is most tangible in the overwhelming debates around The History Manifesto co-written by Guldi and Armitage (2014). For my intervention see Simon (2015a).

2. Sattelzeit is the period between 1750 and 1850, when – according to Koselleck – the transition from early modern to modern took place. Although in discussions of Koselleck it often features as a firm periodization effort, Koselleck (1996, 69) rather regarded the concept pragmatically (as a means to manage the enterprise of conceptual history), and also complained about the utility of the concept (suggesting that Schwellenzeit would be a better name).

3. For different but equally classic arguments about the illegitimacy of philosophizing about history as the course of events within the analytic tradition, see Popper ([1957] 2002) and Danto (1985). For a less known but nonetheless instructive critique from the same tradition, see Mandelbaum (1948). For an ‘end of history’ argument (with an overview and additional arguments about the consequence regarding historical writing as well), within the context of postmodernism, see Jenkins (1999, 26–66). For an argument against the ban, see Runia (2014, 49–53), who also points to a qualification I would like to add. Outside departments of history and philosophy – among political scientists and evolutionary biologists (and practically everyone else) – philosophizing about the course of events continued to be practiced in the postwar period. The point is that philosophy of history understood as the course of events was deemed to be illegitimate, dangerous, and impossible precisely by those who, in one way or another, otherwise claimed expertise in the disciplines related to the enterprise (philosophy and history).

4. To be clear, I do not wish to conduct an inquiry into the nature of time or the temporality of history. Instead, I look for a specific way of conceiving time that we may call ‘historical,’ which might enable us to talk about history as the course of events again without falling prey to substantive thinking. Also, by talking about history as the course of events, I do not wish to talk about the nature of a historical process. What I think (and what has to become clear at the end of this essay) is that conceptualizing history as the course of events is our best effort to initiate, render possible, and make sense of the endeavor of bringing about change in human affairs.

5. In a recent article (Simon 2015a), I dealt more extensively with the unfeasibility of the developmental view on the occasion of discussing White (2014) and Guldi and Armitage (2014). In another article (Simon 2015a) and a talk I gave at The Institute of Historical Research in London under the title ‘A Quasi-Substantive Philosophy of History,’ I also dealt more extensively with the movement of history and with the features of a quasi-substantive philosophy of history. Here, I do not wish to recite everything I said on those occasions, and even though in this and the next section – for the sake of better understanding – I have to touch upon issues I dealt with in the aforementioned articles and talk, my main objective is to elaborate the issue further by drawing the consequences of it for history as historical writing.

6. Nancy’s efforts to think the ‘coming’ or ‘taking place’ of a community without appealing to substantive ideas may have a resemblance to the Derridean messianic project and Derrida’s notion of a ‘future-to-come.’ What nevertheless clearly separates them is that the ‘emancipatory promise’ Derrida (1994) wishes to retain, even in its most contradictory form, cannot be made sense of without getting rid of the developmental structure that houses it. Emancipation is gradual empowerment and it is actually the paradigmatic political action of the industrial era, perfectly suited to the developmental view of history. Giving a messianic edge to the emancipatory project is less a useful tool and more an obstacle to think a notion of history different from the one we inherited from the Enlightenment and German Idealism, which is what I am after in this essay.

7. They can be put to work despite the rather huge differences of the theories in which these ideas are embedded. To mention a few, Nancy’s coming ‘we’ has nothing to do with Ankersmit’s focus on Western civilization as a definite subject of change; Ankersmit’s trauma is the loss of an old world, while Runia’s trauma is rather connected to the events that lead to such loss. Whereas Runia’s ‘presence’ is the past taking over the present, Nancy’s ‘presence’ concerns not the past but the future, the presently non-presence of existence. Furthermore, Nancy does not attribute a mechanism to history in any sense, Ankersmit does not do so deliberately and Runia often exceeds the framework to which I have restricted him. Runia even gives in to substantive thinking eventually by means of a cultural evolutionary vocabulary (Runia 2014, 179–202), overshadowing his focus on discontinuities with postulating a deeper, all-encompassing continuity. But the point I want to make has not so much to do with the rational reconstruction of their ideas; my point is only that by putting these thinkers to work in a certain way permits conceiving of the movement of history as a quasi-substantive philosophy.

8. I do not wish to claim here that we have new anthropological constants whose internal relations structure historical time in general. I use these expressions in a restricted sense, only to explain the temporality of the notion of history as a disrupted singular.

9. As Harlan (2009) argues, a couple of decades later Oakeshott underwent a re-evaluation of his own, growing more sympathetic towards the practical past.

10. If White’s turn to the notion of the practical past were a movie, its Wikipedia page would discuss it in terms of earning ‘mixed to average’ reviews. For a positive one, see Domanska (2014), for a less positive one, see Lorenz (2014).

11. On experientiality, the classic is Fludernik (1996), who defines narrativity as mediated human experientiality. For her updated view on the question of whether historical accounts can qualify as narratives in terms of experientiality, see Fludernik (2010).