Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank Ankersmit is Professor of History at the University of Groningen. Stanford University Press has published three of his previous books: Aesthetic Politics (1996), Historical Representation (2002), and Political Representation (2002).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

SUBLIME HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.....................................................................xiAcknowledgments...........................................................................xiiiPreface...................................................................................xvIntroduction: Experience in history and in philosophy.....................................11 Linguistic transcendentalism in extremis: The case of Richard Rorty.....................172 From language to experience.............................................................693 Huizinga and the experience of the past.................................................1094 Fragments of a history of historical experience.........................................1415 Gadamer and historical experience.......................................................1936 (Pragmatist) aesthetic experience and historical experience.............................2417 Subjective historical experience: The past as elegy.....................................2638 Sublime historical experience...........................................................317Epilogue: Rousseau and Hlderlin..........................................................369Notes.....................................................................................397Index.....................................................................................465

Chapter One

Language goes all the way down. -(Richard Rorty) The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century perfectly suited an abstract, Cartesian view of experience that effectively denied the existence of primary experience. After Descartes, Western philosophers and scientists tended to replace the commonsense concepts of experience, wisdom, and know-how with an increasingly technical account of experience as made up of disconnected, subjective, sensory states. 1.1 introduction

Two different stories can be told about the recent history of philosophy and about Richard Rorty's place in that history. According to the first story, Rorty is the philosopher who broke in a revolutionary and radical manner with what has been for several centuries, since Descartes and Kant, the primary goal of most philosophical investigation. According to the alternative story, he is, on the contrary, the philosopher who-together with some others like Derrida and Davidson-put the crown on that tradition we associate with Descartes and Kant.

Let me start with the first story. This story runs as follows. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, Western philosophy was mainly interested in the problem of the nature of our knowledge of reality; it was always concerned with the metaphysical, epistemological, rationalist, empiricist, or linguistic foundations of our knowledge of reality and with the question how this knowledge is acquired and can be legitimated. The main heroes in this story are Descartes and Kant. As philosophers-and as epistemologists-they opted for what Putnam has called the God's eye view, that is, for a point of view lying itself outside both observed reality and the subject of knowledge, and they hoped that from that "sublime" point of view the relationship between the knowing subject and the object of our knowledge could be established in a neutral and undistorted way. Whatever their differences were, both Descartes and Kant-and the many philosophers who have continued their enterprise down to the present day-believed that all our most essential questions with regard to the nature, origin, "foundations," and legitimation of knowledge could be properly answered from the unassailable point of view of this transcendental self.

It is true that there have been philosophers such as Hegel or Marx who doubted the possibility of such an ahistorical, universalist transcendental point of view. But what philosophers like these effected, in the end, was a historicization of epistemology and a correction of the historical blindness of traditional epistemology rather than its destruction. As Gadamer has so brilliantly shown, historism, Hegel's experiment with the Absolute Spirit and Marx's conception of ideology were, in fact, attempts to continue the epistemological enterprise with even better and stronger, namely historical means rather than that these philosophers dealt the deathblow to epistemology, as they often liked to believe themselves. Historicization was for these philosophers not the destruction but the very perfection of epistemological certainty. Hence, we should not see the historists or the Hegelians as philosophers who were the first to abandon epistemology-as is so often done in accordance with how they liked to present themselves-but rather as those philosophers who have taken the epistemological enterprise to its very logical end. "History" now took the place of the transcendental ego; it offered the only point of view from which truth could be found and was thus expected to fulfill the same function as its more abstract and timeless predecessor.

In sum, it was not Hegel or Foucault but only Rorty, as the true heir to Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, and Davidson and to American pragmatism, who successfully tripped up the whole epistemological tradition. Rorty was the first who had the courage to abandon the transcendentalist point of view and all that went with it: The Rortyan pragmatist knows that such a point of view outside both reality and language is an impossibility and that all the illusions of modernist Western philosophy proceeded from the Enlightenment's dream of the transcendentalist point of view. Hence, with Rorty a long and important chapter in the history of Western philosophy has come to an end, and we may consider his oeuvre as the announcement of a new post-epistemological chapter in the book of that history. Now that the epistemological anachoorsis from the world-the attempt to withdraw from the world to a transcendental point of view outside the world itself-has been abandoned, we may expect that this new chapter will deal with the direct interaction between subject and object, or between language and the world. And since human action is the favorite domain of this interaction between reality and our knowledge of reality, ethics and politics may be expected to become the main topics of this new chapter in the history of philosophy. Ethics and politics will thus take the place of the abstractions of traditional, foundationalist philosophy. The vivere privatim ac domestice will be replaced once again by "civic humanism," just as the medieval obsession with the civitas Dei was replaced, in the works by Bruni or Salutati, by the compass of the vivere civile. And in his later writings Rorty was brilliantly successful in demonstrating what this shift ought to mean for contemporary philosophy.

But one can also tell a quite different story about the history of philosophy and Rorty's role in it. This story goes as follows. The Aristotle of De Anima experience and knowledge are the result of a union, interaction, or even outright identification of the subject and the object of knowledge. The subject may be said to possess (experiential) knowledge of the object if the subject succeeds in achieving a formal (that is, not a material) similarity to the object. One may think here of how our hands may come to "know" the form of an object by following its forms and thus by imitating these forms. Knowledge is, hence, a matter of the subject's being "formed" by the object and of a process in which the object leaves its indelible traces in or on the subject. This conception of knowledge is, obviously, captured far better by what we associate with the sense of touch than with the sense of sight. It makes no sense to say that what we see changes our eyes in some way or another. And, indeed, for Aristotle, just as for Merleau-Ponty in our own time, the sense of touch is prototypical of all experience and of all knowledge based on experience. In this tradition experience articulates itself in how we are formed by it.

In the seventeenth century Descartes finally overturns this Aristotelian tradition because this tradition does not provide us with a reliable criterion for how to distinguish right from wrong. The criteria for distinguishing truth from falsity can be established only at a level that is free from our messy interactions with the world and with which Aristotelianism had been content. Aristotelianism may thus tempt us to take delusions for in controvertible truths. And Descartes concludes that we should abandon the Aristotelian interaction between subject and object and withdraw within the silent and pure sanctuary of the inner forum internum of our rationalist self, judging, like a severe proto-Freudian censor, the reliability of the representations of reality that are offered to it. Only this severe censor, which will not allow itself to be compromised by the chaotic and untidy interactions between subject and object, can be a reliable guide on our way to indubitable certainties and can teach us how to distinguish between appearance and reality, between dream and waking.

Since Descartes and his seventeenth-century rationalist followers, the story of Western philosophy is, essentially, the story of what faculties of the subject, or of the mind, were proposed to assist this censor in our forum internum in its endeavor to distinguish between truth and falsehood and between appearance and reality. The empiricists of the century following Descartes abandoned reason for empirical observation, Berkeley turned to the notion of "the idea" as our transcendental guarantee for our access to reality, Kant primarily proposed thereto the imagination and his categories of the understanding-and Hegel and Marx gave the whole enterprise a new start by turning to history. However, in our own century, continental philosophy since Nietzsche and Anglo-Saxon philosophy since Frege consider language to be the key to most of the secrets surrounding the nature of our knowledge of reality. Whatever may separate Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida on the one hand from Russell, Wittgenstein, and Davidson on the other-this is where they are all in agreement. And the same is no less true for Rorty, for Rorty never really abandons this all-pervasive twentieth-century lingualism. Meaningful interaction with reality is, according to Rorty, impossible outside language; "language goes all the way down" as he puts it, and the explanation of this slogan is that we must think of ourselves "as never encountering reality except under a chosen description."

But just as Hegel gave Kantianism its most convincing and optimal form by historicizing it, so Rorty optimizes lingualism by emphasizing with Davidson the continuous interaction of language and reality. And just as Hegel believed that his philosophical strategy meant a decisive rupture with Kantianism, while, in fact, he gave it its strongest and most convincing form, so is Rorty's pragmatism not the rupture with twentieth-century linguistic transcendentalism that it pretends to be but, in fact, its ultimate vindication.

These two stories about the recent history of philosophy define the plot of my argument in this chapter and the next. According to the first story, Rorty gave the deathblow to the transcendentalist tradition; but in the second story Rorty brought transcendentalism to its highest perfection: Even the domains of Aristotelian experience, the domain of the direct interaction of language and reality, are now no less subject to "the categories of language" as Kantian phenomenal reality was subject to "the categories of the understanding." For Rorty experience and knowledge without language are just as impossible as the experience of noumenal reality was for Kant.

Our question now, obviously, must be which of these two incompatible stories we shall have to prefer. Since Cartesianism initiated transcendentalism by rejecting the Aristotelian account of experience, then set on a path that would, three centuries later, grant to language the priority that experience had for Aristotle, we may expect the relationship between language and experience to give us the key to answering that question. And my story is, therefore, essentially a story about the relationship of language and experience.

1.2 ANTI-REPRESENTATIONALISM

Central in Rorty's thought is his so-called anti-representationalism, his view that we should not conceive of knowledge as a representation or reflection of reality-that is, knowledge and language should not be seen as a kind of mirror of nature-as common sense invites us to do. Rorty has several strong arguments against representationalism, but his most original and convincing critique is undoubtedly the one focusing on traditional conceptions of truth as a correspondence between language (that is, a proposition) and reality. His objection to a pre-Tarskian conception of the correspondence theory of truth is that these conceptions inevitably presuppose the existence of some neutral background that is shared by language and reality and in terms of which truth as correspondence can only be established. There must be such a neutral background, for on the one hand we have such elusive things as sounds, sentences, or meanings and on the other, states of affairs, material things, and so on-and how could we be sure of moving correctly from the one to the other in the absence of such a neutral background that is shared by both? Just as money is, so to speak, the neutral background in terms of which we can argue from a commodity (reality) to its value (language) and, moreover, compare the value of different commodities, hence a background that is shared by commodity and value, so the correspondence theory of truth will inevitably presuppose some kind of formal scheme that will permit us to move from language to reality and vice versa.

However, as the pragmatist William James already observed, such a tertium quid behind or beneath both language and reality simply does not exist; language and reality are all that we have (and need), and it follows that traditional variants of the correspondence theory are founded on the mythology of a nonexisting and redundant "tertium quid intermediate between the facts per se, on the one hand, and all knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the other." No such tertia are given to us, and the tertia that we believe might perform the job we expect them to do are always mere constructions based on intuitions we have with regard to either the facts themselves or the knowledge we have about them. They are intuitions that we, by circular argument, then invoke again in order to back up our claims to truth (in the same way that in a divorce case some people would say the husband's view gives you the truth, whereas others would hold that it is the wife's story that you should listen to). There is nothing beyond either reality or knowledge, and we should therefore abandon our search of a shared neutral background behind both knowledge and reality. The epistemological tradition, on the other hand, has always set great store by these tertia, and in the course of time epistemologists have developed the most ingenious schemata in order to define their nature. Paradigmatic here is the schematism of the categories of the understanding that Kant developed in his first Critique. These categories are the formal schemata within which the manifold of what experience presents to the mind is systematized in such a way that we shall be able to make true statements about (phenomenal) reality; the categories of the understanding function, so to speak, as the epistemological bridge between object and subject. But Rorty expresses his agreement with Davidson when Davidson, in a famous essay much admired by Rorty, categorically rejects the notion "of a conceptual scheme, a way of viewing things, a perspective (or a transcendental constitution of consciousness, or a language or a cultural tradition)." And Rorty concludes:

So I think that Davidson is telling us, once again, that less is more: we should not ask for more detail about the correspondence relation, but rather realize that the tertia which have made us have sceptical doubts about whether most of our beliefs are true are just not there.

Indeed, one of the first fruits that we may expect from our abandonment of the correspondence theory and the schemata supporting it is that we can now vanquish the skepticist and the relativist. All problems occasioned by skepticism and relativism that, characteristically, arose in the wake of the triumph of the Cartesian epistemologist tradition have their common origins in the kind of schemata that I just referred to. In the first place these schemata gave rise to different "ways of worldmaking" (to use Goodman's terminology), suggesting that we can no longer hope for the existence of a "scheme-neutral" reality in terms of which our differences of opinion about what reality is like can be settled. The scheme, initially a mere modest and discrete tertium quid between reality and knowledge, rudely elbowed its way to the foreground while pushing aside both reality and knowledge. It was precisely the tertia, of which so much help was expected, that loosened the ties between language, knowledge, and reality-and since then skepticism has always accompanied Western philosophy just as Nietzsche's stroller is always accompanied by his own shadow: "That shadow all things cast whenever the sunlight of knowledge falls upon them-that shadow too am I."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SUBLIME HISTORICAL EXPERIENCEby Frank Ankersmit Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.