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ABSTRACT
Contemporary theory of history struggles in finding a new research agenda ‘after narrativism.’ One such theoretical example is Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography. This essay argues that Kuukkanen’s position falls within the ambit of his own criteria of narrativism, namely constructivism, representationalism, and holism. Yet, at the same time, Kuukkanen’s reconstruction of narrativism raises serious questions concerning its adequacy. This inadequacy, in connection with Kuukkanen’s view that history books argue for certain theses, leads to some sort of essentialism and ‘isolation’ from the relation between the narrative on the one hand and the historian and the reader on the other. What is more, the main thesis of Kuukkanen’s book is untenable on the basis of the examples to which he refers and lacks concrete instances of informal reasoning in history. As a result, a truly narrativist insight into the specificity of history books paradoxically goes unrecognized and Kuukkanen’s model appears prenarrativist at its core.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Frank R. Ankersmit, Ulrich Timme Kragh, Kalle Pihlainen, Paul Roth, and the two anonymous journal referees for their valuable comments. This does not mean, however, that they agree with the views expressed here.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘The overarching thesis of Time and Narrative (…) is not that historians impose a narrative form on sets or sequences of real events that might just as legitimately be represented in some other, non-narrative discourse but that historical events possess the same structure as narrative discourse.’ (White Citation1991, 142).
2. ‘When, therefore, I spoke of history in an earlier lecture as a dialogue between past and present, I should rather have called it a dialogue between the events of the past and progressively emerging future ends. The historian’s interpretation of the past, his selection of the significant and the relevant, evolves with the progressive emergence of new goals.’ (Carr Citation1987, 123–124). For discussion of the passage, Jenkins (Citation1995, 55–60).
3. Private correspondence with Paul Roth, 19.12.2017. Published with permission.
4. ‘The thesis that all statements expressing the properties of Nss are analytical is, perhaps, the most fundamental theorem in narrative logic.’ (Ankersmit Citation1983, 127).
5. Kuukkanen’s question, ‘Would a book about the Holocaust really bring the Holocaust to the reader?,’ results from a misunderstanding (that is, ontologization) of representation.
6. While historical claims are not analytical, analyticity was mentioned by Kuukkanen as one of the constitutive, holistic features of historical representation. With this being the case, his position is even closer to that of Ankersmit.
7. The ‘statements they contain are not their constituent parts but their properties’ (Ankersmit 1983, 94).
8. I restrict myself to framing this particular piece of narrative in terms of an aggregate of sentences in order to point out the insufficiency and inadequacy of Kuukkanen’s approach. I do not claim that narratives in general are such aggregates (that would be a ‘Windelbandist’ point of view). Narratives obviously contain different kinds of statements, including conditionals and even counterfactuals.
9. For a similar approach of searching for different strata of historical narrative yet one not derived from the method of idealization and concretization, see Topolski (Citation1981).
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Dawid Rogacz
Dawid Rogacz is a Ph.D. Student in Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Principal Investigator of National Science Centre Grant “Chinese Philosophy of History” and one of researchers in European Research Council Grant “Narrative Modes of Historical Discourse in Asia”. Interested in non-Western and narrative theories of history.