The ethics of narrative: a readers’ dialogue

ABSTRACT

This article is a collaborative commentary on the first volume of a two-part anthology of works by Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative, edited by Robert Doran. Informed by the collection and inspired by the co-authors, in this paper we discuss White’s writing. Herman Paul compares White’s constructivism with that of Berger and Luckmann, and discusses the extent to which the tools of historical narrative criticism developed by White are expeditious in analyzing stories about the climate crisis. Kalle Pihlainen captures White’s writing in a three-stage process of emancipatory politics of history, to further reconfigure it using the concept of fidelity. Jakub Muchowski writes about the relationship between the titular ethics and politics, asking to what extent White regarded them as separate spheres of practice, and whether in choosing the former White was apolitical. Ewa Domańska considers how White’s critical approach to history might help to explore possibilities of bridging Indigenous and Western approaches to the past as well as reflects on White’s attitude toward metaphysics. Finally, Miguel Valderrama considers the ways in which White uses the concept of event. The exchange closes with Robert Doran’s response to all the commentaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Hayden White
• constructivism
• politics of history
• Indigenous knowledges
• emancipation
• ethics of history
• event
• metaphysics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Indeed, regrettably, the commonalities between these chapters extend to half of Chapter 5 being repeated almost verbatim (compare pp. 85–89 and pp. 159–164).

2. There appear to be two key lapses here: first, White does not explain how what he asserts historians conventionally do relates to the Christian model of enfiguration that he introduces; second, he fails to make clear the reasons for turning from historicization following the figure-fulfillment model to the kind of representation he attributes to Benjamin.

3. Starting with ‘A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White’s Linguistic Humanism’, in Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 193–227.

4. This is in fact the talk he gave at the ‘Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics’, conference, held at the University of Ghent, Belgium, April 21–23, 2005.

5. For example, a Choctaw historian and writer, Devon A. Mihesuah, remarks: ‘Personally, I side with history philosopher Hayden White who argues that “any science of society should be launched in the service of some conception of social justice, equity, freedom, and progress, that is to say, some idea of what a good society might be”’ (Mihesuah 2003).

6. In the same article, White repeats, ‘For better or worse, after the death of God and the end of metaphysics, history is all we have as the basis for a human science. […] [I]f our inquiry is directed at what Kant projected as his fourth critique, namely, the question “What is man?” then history is all we’ve got’ (White and Doran 2022, 173).

7. Herman Paul also demonstrates that Metahistory is not about the rhetoric of historical texts, but rather about ‘the (metaphysical) views historians hold regarding the nature, goal and purposes of the historical process’ (Paul 2004: 1).

8. Hayden White’s Email Message to Ewa Domanska Dated August 28, 2010.

9. It is not a coincidence that the book titled Figural Realism (1999) and the articles republished in the volume such as ‘Catastrophe, Communal Memory and Mythic Discourse. The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society’ (2000), ‘Figura and Historical Subalternation’ (2000), and ‘The Metaphysics of Western Historiography. Cosmos, Chaos and Sequence in Historiological Representation’ (2004) were written during the same time.

10. Hayden White’s Email Message to Ewa Domanska Dated August 31, 2008. Text authorized.

Additional information

Funding

Ewa Domańska’s contribution was inspired by her cooperation with the TEAM project ‘Core concepts of Historical Thinking’ of the Foundation for Polish Science (Agreement No. POIR.04.04.00-00-5C1E/17-00). Jakub Muchowski contribution to this paper was possible thanks to the support of by National Science Centre, Poland (Grant Number 2020/39/D/HS3/01262). Kalle Pihlainen’s contribution was made possible by his participation in the ‘Temporality in Predictive Processing’ project (Research Council of Finland; Grant Number: 342166), led by Valtteri Arstila.

Notes on contributors

Ewa Domańska

Ewa Domańska is a full Professor of Human Sciences at the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, and a recurrent visiting professor at Stanford University (Spring term). Domańska is a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), and a member of Academia Europaea. Her teaching and research interests include history and the theory of historiography, new and emerging trends in the humanities and social science, environmental humanities, ecocide and genocide studies. She has recently published A História para além do humano [History Beyond the Human], eds. Julio Bentivoglio i Taynna Marino (Fundação Getulio Vargas Press, 2024) and co-edited (with Katarzyna Bojarska, Piotr Filipkowski, Jacek Małczyński, Luiza Nader) Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe (Brill, 2024).

Robert Doran

Robert Doran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Music Theory Department of the Eastman School of Music. He is the author or editor of eight books, including the monographs The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge UP, 2015/2017), which was translated into Spanish in 2021, and The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017). Most recently, he has edited Liszt and Virtuosity (U of Rochester Press, 2020), co-winner of the 2023 Alan Walker Triennial Book Award, sponsored by the American Liszt Society, and two volumes of Hayden White’s late essays for Cornell University Press (vol. 1, 2022; vol. 2, 2023). He has also edited Hayden White’s essay collection The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), and Philosophy of History After Hayden White (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Jakub Muchowski

Jakub Muchowski is an adjunct professor at the Department of History of Jagiellonian University. His research focuses on the theory of historical writing, Polish memory cultures, transnational history of Poland and labour history. Ongoing work centres on reading historical writing, transnational relations between Poland and South Africa and forms of invisibility of labour in industrial museums. He has authored articles in journals including Journal of the Philosophy of History, International Journal of Heritage Studies and Historyka. Studies in Historical Methods.

Herman Paul

Herman Paul is Professor of the History of the Humanities at Leiden University, where he is currently directing a research project on the long-term history of scholarly vices. He is the author of Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (2011), Key Issues in Historical Theory (2015), and Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (2022).

Kalle Pihlainen

Kalle Pihlainen is currently a senior researcher in philosophy at the University of Turku and associate professor of the philosophy of historical culture at the University of Oulu, where he also co-directs the Centre for the Philosophical Studies of History. His research and teaching focus on issues of historical repre- sentation and the uses of history in academic as well as popular contexts.

Miguel Valderrama

Miguel Valderrama (1971) is a historian and philosopher, specializing in aesthetics and art theory (Universidad de Chile). Since its foundation, he has been a member of the editorial team of the cultural magazine Papel Máquina. For Antonio Gramsci. Artes del retrato, he won in 2020 the National Prize for Unpublished Essay awarded by the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of the Government of Chile. Among other books he has published, Posthistoria. Historiografía y comunidad (2005, 2023), El duelo de la imagen (2022), Modernismos historiográficos. Artes visuales, postdictadura, vanguardias (2008, 2022), Sublime histórico (2021), Antonio Gramsci. Artes del retrato (2021), Prefacio a la postdictadura (2018), Coloquio sobre Gramsci (2016), Traiciones de Walter Benjamin (2015). He is a co-author of Hegemonía y visualidad. Inventario [1987-2017] (2019), Consignas (2014) and Historiografía postmoderna (2010), as well as an editor of Patricio Marchant. Prestados nombres (2012) and ¿Qué es lo contemporáneo? Actualidad, tiempo histórico, utopías del presente (2011).