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Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics

University of California Press

Over the past century or so, cultural changes centering on the erosion of foundationalist metaphysics have called forth an ever more explicit effort to specify the contours of a postmetaphysical culture. That effort has encompassed earlier thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, and Martin Heidegger, and it has brought hermeneutics, deconstruction, and neopragmatism to center stage in recent decades. All the strands in our culture, from philosophy and science to literature and politics, have been at issue in this discussion, but the place of "history" has been central—and especially elusive. Sometimes explicitly, often only implicitly, thinkers prominent in this cultural reassessment have thought anew about what is historical and about the role of historical inquiry and understanding. Taking for granted the waning of metaphysics, this study examines its implications for the place of history, as one competing cultural strand.

As Richard Rorty has emphasized, the foundationalist assumptions of our tradition have been gradually eroding for the last one hundred fifty years, as philosophers have chipped away at such notions as "self-validating truth," "transcendental argument," and "principle of the ultimate foundation of all possible knowledge."1 After Nietzsche, Heidegger, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, and Donald Davidson, there are few foundationalists to be found on either side of the notorious divide between Continental and Anglo-American philosophy. And because our whole philosophical tradition has been

Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109–110.

fundamentally metaphysical, what is apparently unraveling is not simply a delimited philosophical genre but also epistemology and any possibility of privileged methods or decision procedures affording access to certain, suprahistorical truth. But what is left, and how do we make our way in the world that remains to us?

This change in the intellectual landscape has had implications for history in both its customary senses—as res gestae, the past, the stuff that historical inquiry seeks to apprehend, and as historia rerum gestarum, the past as related or conveyed, the historical account. At issue, in fact, have been broad questions about the human relationship to a world that sometimes seems fundamentally historical in a new, radically post-Hegelian sense. But whereas some of the answers seem to portend an expanded cultural role for history, others seem to undermine even the role—modest by some measures, grandiose by others—that history came to play by the late nineteenth century. Indeed, assaults on "history" have been central to a number of the cultural responses to the eclipse of metaphysics, and history itself is sometimes assumed to be ending along with foundationalist philosophy.

Even the terminology surrounding history has become ever more complex and uncertain as the wider intellectual framework has changed. The term "historicism" has remained central to humanistic discussion, even taking on yet another lease on life by the latter 1980s as "the new historicism" became a catchphrase in literary studies, then spilled over to influence historiography. What historicism might entail proves crucial to any effort to assess the status of history after metaphysics, yet even within the same intellectual camp, some refer to it approvingly, others disparagingly.2 Those seeking to place our situation in historical perspective often refer to an earlier "crisis of historicism," yet they do not seem to understand the crisis in the same way, or even to date it at the same time.

Among thinkers responding to the waning of metaphysics, the now-familiar sequence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida has been especially influential. Their efforts, taken together, constitute a culture of extremity, as Allan Megill showed in his influential Prophets of Extremity , published in 1985. Although some found the extremes nihilistic in implication, many embraced them as liberating from the authoritarianism of our metaphysical tradition. Also prominent, by the 1980s, was a more general aestheticism that similarly contested metaphysically grounded approaches, though its relationship with the extremes was complex. This aestheticism affected readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, gave a certain spin to deconstruction, and led to a particular recasting of the hermeneutic and pragmatist strands within our tradition.3

For a good assessment of the term and its recent uses, see George G. Iggers, "Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term," Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 1 (January 1995): 129–152.

The understanding of postmetaphysical possibilities that resulted from the combination of extremity and aestheticism seemed to have unfavorable implications for history.

However, some who welcomed the postmetaphysical turn sought an alternative response, though their efforts were disparate and their alternative hard to characterize. In one sense, it was to be "moderate"—no longer metaphysical, and thus not "authoritarian," yet eschewing the extremes at the same time. But though moderate in this sense, such an alternative might prove more radical than the extremes, which, despite their apocalyptic quality, seemed to some to undermine the scope for any politically significant radicalism. At the same time, those seeking this moderate alternative were leery of aestheticist tendencies and clung to the scope for truth. Rather than accent personal edification, they played up the human role in the ongoing reconstruction of the world in history. And the approach they envisioned seemed to entail an enhanced cultural role for empirical historiography.

The outcome of the waning of metaphysics has so far been a kind of field of forces, including an array of extreme responses, not all of them compatible, a generically aestheticist tendency, and a quest for a moderate, constructive alternative. In my view, there is value, or at least plausibility, to a great many of these impulses, including extremes that some find merely nihilistic. But the sources of these diverse responses, their implications and the connections among them, have not been well understood. Moreover, uncertainty regarding the baggage that "history" must carry has produced confusion and excess. As a result, our understanding of postmetaphysical cultural possibilities has been prejudicial and limiting.

The status of history was already in question before the waning of metaphysics forced the more insistent reconsideration of cultural priorities that has marked the period since about 1960. Indeed, it has long been a commonplace that the break into twentieth-century culture was bound up with a retreat from the premium on historical approaches that marked "the great age of history" in the nineteenth century.4 Somehow the sphere of public, objective history, which

"Aestheticism" is central to Allan Megill's account in Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985). See also Alexander...