The view from the fence

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

I thank both Anton Froeyman and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon for the challenging discussions concerning Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. Without those, my account of that book's intentions would undoubtedly have been less understanding.

Notes

^1. It is worth noting that in her essay on Ankersmit's shift ‘from narrative to experience,’ Ewa Domanska has insightfully collected the core of Ankersmit's ideological motivation for ‘sublime historical experience’ on these two pages (Domanska 2009, 184 and 185).

^2. Or, to take things into another currently popular direction: the argument could also be made from the point of view of attributing agency to objects and structures so as not to so easily miss their impact on our actions. To me, all these options could provide less mystical-sounding ways of presenting largely the same ideas. There are things that are not language, at least not in an articulated way, that impact and infringe on our possibilities. And a lot (if not indeed all) of these things are of the past when ‘past’ is not understood in strictly academic historical terms.

^3. Unproblematic, that is, pace philosophers of history such as Jonathan Gorman, who quite correctly note that the relation of language to reality is problematic at every level but who do not consider that since narrative constructivists are not focused on historical research but on historical writing, this kind of agreement makes good practical sense for them.

^4. For a detailed argument against this more complex construction by Ankersmit, see, for example, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen's Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Palgrave forthcoming). The difficulty with this particular model of representation is that it seems to attribute some immanent meaning to the ‘presented’: if it is not the representation that provides (intensional) meaning, how can any ‘presented’ ever become individuated? Ankersmit's example of the picture of a person's profile could equally well be the ‘presented’ or ‘aspect’ of a haircut from the side (cf. Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation, 69 ff.).

^5. Or at least I have not come across many such objections in discussions or in print. For an examination of this tendency in Ankersmit and in the present discourse on history more generally, see Pihlainen (2014), particularly regarding a confusion between actual experience of the world and a heightened sense of experientiality created by aesthetic constructs, like history.