Keywords: anachronism, Frank Ankersmit, historicism, modernism, narrative, postfoundationalism, Abstract

Transcription

1 History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: Why Historical Distance is not a Problem Mark Bevir Abstract This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear with postfoundationalism. The developmental historicism of the nineteenth century appealed to narrative principles to establish continuity between past and present and to guide selections among facts. In the twentieth century, modernist historicists rejected such principles, thereby raising the specter of historical distance: that is, the distorting effects of the present on accounts of the past, the chasm between facts and narrative. The modernist problem became: how can historians avoid anachronism and develop accurate representations of the past? Instead of using narrative principles to select facts, modernist historicists appealed to atomized facts to validate narratives. However, in the late twentieth century, postmodernists (Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White) argued that there was no way to close the distance between facts and narratives. The postmodern problem became: how should historians conceive of their writing given the ineluctable distance between facts and narratives? Today, postfoundationalism dispels both modernist and postmodernist concerns with historical distance; it implies that all concepts (not just historical ones) fuse fact and theory, and it dissolves issues of conceptual relativism, textual meaning, and re-enactment. Keywords: anachronism, Frank Ankersmit, historicism, modernism, narrative, postfoundationalism, postmodernism, Hayden White Historical distance the gap between past and present, or between fact and narrative was among the most widely discussed issues in historical theory during the twentieth century. Yet, historical distance is not a perennial problem; it does not inevitably arise even for those who have a historicist sensibility and write histories. To the contrary, I will argue that the issue of historical distance really spread only with the modernist historical theories of the early and mid twentieth century, and although it persisted through the postmodern historical theories of the late twentieth century, it disappears once we fully appreciate the implications of postfoundationalism. I begin this essay by contextualizing worries about historical distance. The developmental historical theories of the nineteenth century appealed to teleological and substantive principles to ensure continuity between past and present and to bridge facts and narrative. In the early twentieth century, however, there arose new modernist modes of knowing that rejected these principles. By modernism I do not mean to evoke a contrast with medieval or early modern. Rather, modernism refers here to the cultural shift in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-

2 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 25 ries that promoted more fragmented and formal approaches to art and knowledge. Modernism had an atomistic and analytic orientation. It undermined confidence in the continuity of past and present. Historians thus confronted more pronounced worries about how from within the present they could develop concepts and narratives capable of bridging the distance between their world and the past. Modernists associated historical theory with discussion of how to avoid anachronisms and to ensure their narratives were adequate to the facts. They appealed to rigorous methods to secure atomized facts, which, in turn, could justify narratives. In contrast, postmodernists such as Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White argued that there was no possible way of bridging the distances between past and present and so between historical facts and historians narratives. They emphasized the ineluctable role of metaphor and textuality in historical writing. They redefined historical theory as the study of the ways in which historical writing relies on literary and aesthetic devices to transform facts and descriptions into narratives and representations. My aim is, however, not only to contextualize modernist and postmodernist worries about historical distance, but also to dispel them. The key to dispelling problems of historical distance is to recognize the lingering modernist themes in Ankersmit s and White s accounts of facts and descriptions. These postmodernists still treated facts and descriptions as atomistic knowledge and statements that possess meaningful content outside of theoretical contexts and narratives. In contrast, postfoundationalism implies that all facts are theory-laden, for no proposition can refer outside of the context of a wider web of beliefs. Postfoundationalism thereby dispels both the postmodernist and modernist ideas of historical distance. It suggests that historians cannot access the past and secure facts apart from the context of their present concepts and theories. The past only ever appears in our present beliefs; it is never given at a distance. Perhaps there might still be a different kind of distance within our present beliefs between the terms we apply to the past and those we apply to the present, and perhaps this distance might still generate worries about conceptual relativism, textual meaning, and re-enactment. I conclude the paper, however, by suggesting that postfoundationalism also dissolves or at least dilutes these worries. I. Problems of Historical Distance Worries about historical distance spread in a particular context. In the nineteenth century, romantic (or, rather more accurately, developmental) theories often emphasized the organic, meaningful, and even spiritual nature of history conceived as a progressive unity. Developmental historicists were not hostile to facts, rigor, or objectivity. 1 They believed that objective narratives required impartial, systematic, and rigorous collection and sifting of facts. Yet, they collected and sifted facts 1. Throughout I use the term historicism to refer to attempts to explain human activity diachronically rather than in more formal or structural ways. While this concept of historicism is widespread, my aim is to tell a historical narrative of historicism focusing on Anglophone scholarship. This aim may explain how and why my sub-categories developmental, modernist, postmodernist overlap with and yet differ from those associated with explorations of historicism couched in terms of a religious impulse or disciplinary matrix.

3 26 mark bevir in the context of developmental narratives. This developmental historicism arose within a range of different modes of thinking, including evolutionary theorizing, Whig conjectural histories derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, the romanticism and idealism associated above all with Hegel, and a much broader organicist emphasis on the ability of living beings to make social institutions by acting in accord with purpose, thought, and imagination. 2 The developmental narratives attracted both sides in the dispute among positivists and idealists. Positivists followed August Comte, J. S. Mill, and Leopold von Ranke in promoting rigorous methods, but they saw evolutionary theory as the pinnacle of science and so a suitable theoretical context in which to situate empirical findings. 3 Idealists defined the absolute as spiritual perfection, but they relied on Hegelianism and social organicism to delineate developmental contexts in which the absolute unfolded. 4 Developmental historicists told narratives of continuity and progress based on teleological and substantive principles, such as self, nation, reason, and spirit. Questions about historical distance rarely arose. For a start, developmental historicists relied on teleological and substantive principles to postulate the unity of history. The principles of nation, reason, and spirit bound past and present together in an organic whole. Different historical eras were united by a commonality of experience. In addition, developmental historicists typically understood the past by locating it in relation to a larger whole based on their concepts of nation, reason, and spirit. They relied on teleological and substantive principles to select facts and give direction to their narratives. They concentrated on incremental changes in the ideas and institutions associated with the triumph of these principles. Even when they pointed to threats to these principles, they still conceived progress as built into the order of things. A loss of faith in progress and reason began in the late nineteenth century and became widespread following World War I. Images and ideals of progress continued to appear after the Great War, but progress was increasingly portrayed as a contingent victory of human activity, not an ineluctable feature of history. 5 People often argued that progress depended on the promotion of new sciences to solve social problems. World War I encouraged calls for new sciences even as it eroded faith in developmental historicism. The new sciences characteristically relied on modernist empiricism. 6 They broke up the narratives and continuities of older developmental narratives, dividing the world into discrete and discontinuous units, and making sense of these units by means of mathematical rules and analytic 2. J. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966); J. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 3. M. Bevir, Sidney Webb: Utilitarianism, Positivism, and Social Democracy, Journal of Modern History 74 (2002), ; N. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); D. Ross, On the Misunderstanding of Ranke and the Origins of the Historical Profession in America, in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. G. Iggers and J. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), S. den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 5. J. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6. Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880, ed. R. Adcock, M. Bevir, and S. Stimson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); D. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chaps

4 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 27 schemas. In the social sciences, modernist empiricism inspired the rise of ahistorical correlations, formal models, and functional systems as alternative modes of explanation to the older historical narratives. It is important to emphasize that the shift from developmental historicism to modernist empiricism was one of modes of explanation a shift from developmental thinking to formal theorizing. Many nineteenth-century historians were ardent fact-finders who championed the spread of rigorous methods, and some even conceived themselves as concentrating solely on securing facts, suggesting that the time for narratives had not yet come; but they still typically understood and secured these facts by explicit or implicit appeals to an existing or projected set of principles and a developmental or teleological narrative. Similarly, some twentieth-century modernists focused on speculative schemas rather than facts or methods; but their schemas were formal models and correlations and synchronic accounts of systems and structures. Historians were less likely than social scientists to reject historical explanations, but they too turned away from developmental thinking. Modernist historians adopted a more atomistic approach to facts in the absence of substantive and teleological principles. They thus tried to find a way of securing facts outside the context of broader narratives. Historical distance appeared to be both a benefit and a hindrance in securing facts. On the one hand, some modernist historians drew on the empiricist legacy of Comte, Mill, and Ranke to argue that the passage of time actually facilitates a comprehensive and impartial perspective. 7 They emphasized that historians typically have to wait for official papers and archives to be made public before they can have comprehensive access to all relevant facts. They also suggested that historians often require an emotional distance from their material if they are to be objective. On the other hand, however, modernist historians had to be sure that time did not hide or distort the facts. They thus tried to devise methods that would enable them to recover lost and neglected facts. They even suggested that rigorous methods could secure the validity and truth of the facts. Modernist historical theory thus consisted largely of the attempt to use rigorous methods to establish atomized facts that in turn could conclusively determine the truth or falsity of narratives. 8 It was because modernists took a more atomistic view of facts that the problem of historical distance spread. Modernists rejected the teleological and substantive principles by which developmental historicists had created continuity between past and present and selected facts for inclusion in their narratives. No doubt historical consciousness more or less by definition involves some kind of distinction between past and present. Equally, however, a distinction between past and present need not entail any particular worries about the epistemic difficulties of knowing the past given that one tries to do so from the perspective of the present; it may bring such worries, but it need not. So, developmental historicists believed in substantive and teleological principles that guaranteed the ability to comprehend the past in terms set by the present. It was only when modernists rejected these principles that 7. P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 8. M. Bentley, Modernizing England s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5 28 mark bevir they lost this guarantee of a bridge from the present back to the past. Modernists thereby turned awareness of the distinction between past and present into problems of historical distance. They asked, how in the absence of the continuities once guaranteed by developmental principles could historians understand times other than their own? For a start, when modernists rejected the principles linking past and present, they gave new potency to the question of how historians could know that their concepts were not anachronistic. In addition, when modernists rejected the principles governing selection of facts for inclusion in narratives, they raised the question of how historians narratives related to the facts. Generally, modernists responded to the problem of historical distance by appealing to rigorous empirical methods in order to secure atomized facts that, in turn, secured narratives. Peter Laslett provides just one example. Laslett introduced an edited collection, titled Philosophy, Politics, and Society, with a stridently modernist manifesto. 9 He evoked a positivism that equated knowledge with empirical science and limited theory to the rigorous analysis of language-use as exemplified by the work of Gilbert Ryle and T. D. Weldon. Laslett s edition of John Locke s Two Treatises provided a triumphant example of the new modernist history. He approached the Two Treatises using the favored sources and techniques of modernist historians. He relied on archival and primary documents Locke s library, lists of the books Locke owned, hand-corrected prints of the Two Treatises, and Locke s diary and personal correspondence. These sources provided him with facts on which to base his historical interpretation. Knowledge of the dates when Locke read books suggested that Locke had written passages referring to those books only after those dates. Laslett s work revolutionized historians view of Locke. He showed that Locke had written most of the Second Treatise in The Two Treatises could not possibly have been written as a defense of the Glorious Revolution. They were an Exclusion Tract calling for a revolution. 10 Modernist historians wanted to use secure, atomized facts to defend the validity of narratives. They confronted the question of how to overcome historical distance to be sure of facts. How could they avoid the distorting effects of their present situation? How could they avoid anachronism and discover the facts? Typically, modernist historicists appealed to rigorous methods. Quentin Skinner who set out to do for Hobbes what Laslett had done for Locke provides an example. 11 Skinner defended contextualism as a modernist method that would establish facts and decide the validity of narratives. He consistently described his method as a necessary and perhaps even sufficient or more colloquially an essential requirement for a proper understanding of a historical text. Skinner argued that because the expression and reception of illocutionary force requires shared conventions, historians must study contexts if they are to understand what authors were doing. He implied that rigorous research can enable historians to 9. P. Laslett, Introduction, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. P. Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956). 10. John Locke s Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), Q. Skinner, Interview by Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrämäki, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 6 (2002), 42.

6 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 29 build up a body of factual knowledge by which to establish what an author intended to do: if we succeed in identifying this context with sufficient accuracy, we can eventually hope to read off what the speaker or writer in whom we are interested was doing. 12 For Skinner, contextualism enabled historians to avoid anachronism and reach valid interpretations. Anachronistic interpretations present authors as contributing to debates that knowledge of the context shows were not around when the authors wrote. Valid interpretations recover authors intentions to address particular questions at particular times. Skinner presented his contextualist method as the only way to avoid anachronistic myths. 13 While modernist historians tried to overcome historical distance by using rigorous methods, the postmodernists embraced it. Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White insisted that historians and narratives always remain separate from the past and facts. 14 They emphasized that historians construct their representations and narratives not solely to fit the facts but also through metaphor, plot, and other textual strategies. Ankersmit and White thereby staked out a distinctive approach to historical theory. They turned away from both the speculative principles of developmental historicists and the methodologies of modernist historians. They focused on the literary structures and aesthetic choices involved in historical writing. Ankersmit and White are associated with a postmodern approach to historical theory. Their postmodernism appears in the apparently relativist implications of their emphasis on the distance between facts and narratives and so their concern with literary and aesthetic issues. Ironically, however, although Ankersmit and White are described as postmodernists, their approach to historical theory echoes modernism and implicitly rejects postfoundationalism. Ankersmit and White rely on a modernist understanding of historical distance as a disjuncture between, on the one hand, facts and descriptions, and, on the other, narratives and representations. They express a modernist view of atomized facts. Sometimes they even suggest that facts are given as true or false depending on whether or not they correspond to the world. Ankersmit has long suggested that single descriptive statements can be true or false in a correspondence sense, and he has come explicitly to defend pre-cognitive experiences outside language and theorization. 15 White has long distinguished events as given chronological items from the plots that historians impose on these events, and he has come explicitly to defend the reality of events in the past as given independent of their literary portrayal Q. Skinner, A Reply to Critics, in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. J. Tully (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988), Q. Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context. 14. F. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian s Language (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983); F. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); F. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); H. White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and H. White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 15. F. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 16. H. White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

7 30 mark bevir The postmodernists differed from modernists not in their account of historical distance, but in their response to it. The modernists tried to overcome historical distance by appealing to rigorous methods to secure facts and so narratives. The postmodernists reveled in historical distance, arguing that it constituted historical writing as a distinctive literary endeavor, rather than one aiming exclusively at factual truths. In their view, historical writing was distinct from factual scientific writing precisely because historical distance meant that historians inevitably use literary devices and aesthetic modes of representation. II. Postfoundationalism: A Contemporary Solution Historical distance is not necessarily a problem. It was not a problem for many developmental historicists who used teleological and substantive principles to guarantee historical continuity and to fuse fact and narrative. Historical distance became a problem only when modernists rejected such principles, opening up the possibility of divisions between past and present, facts and narratives. Modernists wanted historical theory to concentrate on epistemologies and methodologies by which historians might bridge these divisions. Postmodernists did not dismiss the problem of historical distance so much as embrace it. Arguing that the gap between past and present, and between fact and narrative, could never be bridged, they redefined historical theory as the study of the literary and aesthetic dimensions that were intrinsic to historical writing because of this unavoidable gap. Postfoundationalists reject modernism in a way that dispels the issue of historical distance. Before I explore postfoundationalism, however, I need to address a possible confusion in terminology. Postmodernism is sometimes defined as synonymous with or at least a subset of postfoundationalism. 17 Yet, postmodern historical theorists do not seem to be postfoundationalists. Ankersmit and White may reject the idea that historical narratives can ever be declared true or false simply by appeals to facts. But they do not seem to reject the idea of pure facts outside categories and language. To the contrary, they define historical narratives in contrast to just such facts, suggesting there are such facts but historical writing is not fixed by them. For example, White appeals to the transition from the level of fact or event in the discourse to that of narrative; he argues, this transition is effected by a displacement of the facts onto the ground of literary figurations or, what amounts to the same thing, the projection onto the facts of the plot structure of one or another of the genres of literary figuration. 18 So, in historical theory, postmodernists may challenge the very possibility of narratives being fixed by facts, but they do not challenge, as would postfoundationalists, the very possibility of secure facts. Let me turn to postfoundationalism and its implications for historical distance. Postfoundationalists believe that no knowledge is absolutely certain. Often they believe more specifically that knowledge never has absolutely secure foundations in pure experience or pure reason. Postfoundationalists have varied reasons 17. For a more historically flexible view of postmodernism, see Histories of Postmodernism, ed. M. Bevir, J. Hargis, and S. Rushing (New York: Routledge, 2007). 18. White, Content of the Form, 47.

8 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 31 for rejecting certainty. Some stress the unstable content of signs and the importance of the relations among signs. 19 Others stress the impossibility of ascribing meaning and truth conditions to isolated propositions outside of a wider web of beliefs. 20 For whatever reason, postfoundationalists agree that there cannot be any pure experiences. Experiences are necessarily theory-laden. They are constituted in part by prior categories, traditions, discourses, and languages. Fully to grasp the implications of postfoundationalism for historical distance, we need to understand how it alters the notions of fact and objectivity. 21 Postfoundationalism does away with certain facts, whether these facts derive directly from pure experience or indirectly by way of rigorous methods. Acceptance of a particular experience or rigorous method necessarily depends on prior theories that are fallible. For postfoundationalists, a fact is not given; it is a piece of evidence nearly everyone in a given community either accepts or perhaps has good warrant for accepting given the other intersubjective beliefs of that community. This definition of a fact follows from recognition of the theory-laden nature of experience. Because theory necessarily enters into experience, we cannot describe a fact as a statement of how things are. Facts always entail prior categories. They are not certain truths. They are things we currently agree to accept as true given the other things we believe. 22 A postfoundational analysis of facts suggests that they are always entwined with narratives. A fact acquires its character as a result of its relationship to other facts. A narrative does not just explain facts by postulating significant relationships among them, it also thereby reveals the character of those facts. Again, narratives do not just reveal the character of facts, they create their character and they guide our decisions as to what counts as a fact. Because there are no pure observations, historians partly construct the character of a fact through their narratives. Postfoundationalism undermines the possibility of treating facts as secure outside of theories and narratives. However, to insist on the theory-laden nature of facts is not necessarily to adopt relativism. Postfoundationalists can redefine objectivity in terms of a reasonable comparison among the available narratives. In this view, objective knowledge depends on historians criticizing and comparing narratives in relation to the agreed facts. Historians cannot say that a narrative is proven or falsified by facts, but they can compare narratives in terms of their relative success in relating facts to one another by highlighting similarities, differences, and connections. Sometimes there might be no way for historians to decide between two or more narratives, but this will not always be the case, and even when it is historians still can decide between these two or more narratives and many inferior ones. A concept of objective knowledge as a product of a comparison between rival stories raises the question of what criteria should guide the comparison. My own view is that we might derive such criteria from the assumption of postfounda- 19. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 20. W. Quine and J. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random House, 1970). 21. M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap Actually, I think a fact is something that we accept as an exemplary perception, but what follows does not depend on this more specific definition.

9 32 mark bevir tionalism. 23 Because the question of defining criteria of comparison arises specifically for postfoundationalists, we may reasonably assume a postfoundationalist perspective in answering the question. Postfoundationalism itself might then generate criteria such as accuracy to agreed facts, comprehensive coverage of the relevant facts, consistency and compatibility with agreed standards of evidence, and a progressive, fruitful, and open relation to other narratives. For now, however, the important point is that whatever criteria postfoundationalists adopt, they will conceive of objectivity as the result of a practice of comparison rather than a confrontation between a narrative and secure facts. This postfoundational analysis of facts and objectivity dispels the problem of historical distance. In general terms, postfoundationalism undermines the idea that facts about the past are given outside present theories and narratives; it fuses past and present, facts and narratives. Consider, more specifically, the modernist concern with historical distance. Once modernists gave up on the principles of developmental historicists, they tried to justify narratives by appealing to atomized facts. The separation of facts and narratives seemed crucial if facts were to justify narratives. The problem for modernist historians was then to overcome historical distance, avoid anachronism, and secure facts. Their solution was rigorous methods. Yet, postfoundationalists deny the possibility of separating facts from narratives and so past from present. The content of facts necessarily reflects the narratives in which they are located. There cannot be facts outside narratives. There cannot be access to the past outside of our present reconstruction of it. Modernists might worry that giving up on the possibility of secure facts outside of narratives leaves postfoundationalists with no way to justify historical knowledge. Postfoundationalists will respond that this worry mistakenly assumes that justification requires a kind of certainty that we simply cannot have. They will say that historical knowledge is objective not by virtue of its correspondence to given facts, but by virtue of its being the best account currently available. Now consider the postmodern approach to historical distance. Postfoundationalists might seem to line up with postmodernists in that they reject the possibility of justifying narratives by reference to secure facts. However, postfoundationalism differs significantly from the postmodernism of Ankersmit and White. The postmodernists accept a modernist account of historical distance. They accept the separation of facts and narratives and so of past and present. It is just that the postmodernists argue that there is no way to overcome this separation; historical narratives necessarily involve literary tropes that distinguish them from chronological records of events. Yet, postfoundationalists reject the possibility of facts outside theoretical contexts. All knowledge incorporates both facts and theories. Even chronologies of events are inherently theory-laden. Postfoundationalism thereby undermines the postmodernists emphasis on the allegedly peculiar tropology of historical narratives. All knowledge including natural science as well as history involves a kind of theoretical or literary construction of the facts. 24 Postfoundationalism thereby 23. Bevir, Logic of the History of Ideas, chap The difference between postfoundational and postmodern views of knowledge was one of the main issues in my debate with Ankersmit. Ankersmit argued historical knowledge requires us to make concepts whereas everyday knowledge requires us to match our concepts to something out-

10 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 33 renders irrelevant that a narrative entails a type of projection; relevant instead is the reasonableness of the form of projection that a narrative entails. By dissolving historical distance, postfoundationalism removes the grounds on which the postmodernists tried to redefine historical theory as the study of the peculiarly literary and aesthetic nature of historical narratives and representations. III. Rethinking Historical Theory As postfoundationalism dissolves historical distance, so it challenges the two main twentieth-century approaches to historical theory. For a start, postfoundationalism challenges modernist theory with its focus on facts and its methodological ambitions. Historical theory need not be about devising rigorous methods to secure facts. No method can possibly secure facts independently of a fallible and contestable set of background theories. Objective knowledge depends not on methods and facts but on a process of comparison. In addition, postfoundationalism challenges postmodern theory with its focus on the study of the literary and aesthetic features of historical writing. Historical theory need be no more about tropology than need the philosophy of science. No doubt the presentation of all types of knowledge can involve literary devices; but the ways in which historical narratives go beyond facts and incorporate theories does not distinguish them from any other type of knowledge. Postfoundationalism points toward a new approach to historical theory less methodological, less literary, and more philosophical. Historical theory might ask epistemological questions about knowledge and belief: What is knowledge of history? How should historians justify their beliefs about the past? Historical theory might ask ontological questions about the objects historians postulate when describing the past: What kinds of objects make up the past? Should historians conceive of varied objects in terms set by realism, nominalism, or constructionism? And historical theory might ask metaphysical questions about concepts relevant to historical explanation, including cause and effect, will and determinism, and time and identity: Are human subjects capable of innovative agency? What forms of explanation should historians adopt to explain beliefs, actions, and practices? A postfoundational approach to historical theory would differ from modernism and postmodernism. Unlike postmodernism, it would not focus on written histories to explore their literary construction. Instead, it would return to philosophical questions about the forms of justification and explanation that historians should adopt. However, unlike modernist historicism, it would not tell historians how to do their research what methods to adopt or forego. Instead it would explore the grammar of our concepts in an attempt to free historians from the bewitching effects of modernism. My argument about historical distance exemplifies this postfoundational approach to historical theory. It draws out the conceptual implications of postfoundationalism in an attempt to liberate historians from any lingering, modernist worries about the relationship of past to present or fact to narrative. It does not side them. I replied that all knowledge involves making we can never match concepts to given facts. See M. Bevir and F. Ankersmit, Exchanging Ideas, Rethinking History 4 (2000),

11 34 mark bevir obliterate the distinction between past and present just worries about that distinction. Indeed, although postfoundationalism allows us to dismiss worries about historical distance, it does not remove the distinction between past and present. Postfoundationalism guarantees overlaps and continuities between past and present by locating the past in our present webs of belief, but it retains a distinction in our webs of belief between past and present. Again, to put the point the other way round: postfoundationalism distinguishes past and present, but like developmental historicism, it provides us historical consonance. Postfoundationalism negates the idea that there could be an unbridgeable gap between past and present, fact and narrative. As developmental historicism established a bridge from the present back to the past by means of principles, so postfoundationalism does so by locating them both in a single web of beliefs. For postfoundationalists, the possibility of the past being utterly foreign to the present does not even arise; the past just is the past as we comprehend it in the present. Critics might suggest that postfoundationalists still confront worries akin to those related to historical distance; postfoundationalists still might worry about the adequacy of using present concepts to convey the rather different concepts that they ascribe to people in the past. Yet, this criticism fails to recognize the extent to which postfoundationalism undermines worries about historical distance by recasting them as matters of translation or redescription within our own web of beliefs. The difficulty is no longer to reach from the present back to the past; it is just to describe what we believe about the past and, at least sometimes, to convey our beliefs about the past to others using concepts with which they are readily familiar. Postfoundationalism dissolves the problem of historical distance into the more general and far more manageable one of describing and communicating one set of beliefs and concepts using another set. To see how postfoundationalism recasts dramatic worries about historical distance into prosaic ones about redescription, let us look briefly at three specific issues. The first issue is conceptual relativism, or the legitimacy of treating our ideas as valid for other times and places. The second issue is textual meaning, or the legitimacy of attributing to actions meanings they could not have had at the time. The final issue is re-enactment, or the legitimacy of using our concepts to cover very different ideas from the past. Conceptual Relativism Conceptual relativists question the legitimacy of treating our concepts as valid for other times. Their position seems obviously implausible with respect to knowledge of the natural world. Surely if historians discussed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, they could draw on our knowledge of volcanic behavior even though this knowledge was not shared by the people in Pompeii at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius. Historians can draw freely on our current knowledge of volcanic behavior because this knowledge is, in our view, about universal laws. Conceptual relativism appears more troubling when historians discuss human life. If historians describe or explain the past using our concepts of action and meaning, do they do violence to people who did not hold those concepts? If people did not conceive of themselves as subjects acting for reasons of their own, can

12 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 35 historians legitimately discuss their actions in such terms? Historians can apply our concept of action to others provided our analysis of that concept suggests it applies universally. However, the relevant idea of universal applicability is one that cannot be provided by any amount of empirical evidence. (Empirical evidence cannot support such universality partly because of the familiar problem of induction, and partly because the empirical evidence would embody the analysis to which it was supposed to lend support such that a justification of the analysis by reference to the evidence would be tautological.) If historians want to give universal applicability to our concept of action, they have to do so by philosophical argument. Historians have to show the grammar of our concepts is such that our concept of action applies to other times. Again, historians can fend off conceptual relativism by showing that intentionality and agency are invariant features of our concept of action. A conceptual relativist might complain that our conceptual analysis of action, with its related notion of intentionality, might be false. But this complaint misses the point. The point is not to defend our concepts as True in any grand metaphysical sense. It is merely to show that our belief in these concepts commits us to certain other positions. Once we grant we cannot conclusively prove the Truth of our concepts a point to which relativists give great weight the fact that our beliefs might not be True need concern us very little. What will concern us is, first, that our concepts are ones we deploy for good reasons, and, second, that these concepts entail the reasonableness of applying our conceptual analysis of action whenever we discuss actions. Textual Meaning Philosophical appeals to the grammar of our concepts enable historians to defend their use of abstract concepts referring to universal human capacities. It is harder to imagine such philosophical arguments applying to concrete concepts that prescribe content to these capacities. The grammar of our concepts may justify a historian treating people as agents even if they did not understand themselves as such, but it does not seem to justify any claim that agents universally act in a particular way. Again, it may not be anachronistic to discuss people as having a capacity for agency even if they do not have such a concept, but perhaps it is anachronistic to discuss Shakespeare s agency as expressed in Julius Caesar in a manner that involves ascribing to him our concept of a wristwatch. Historical distance often gets discussed in relation to the legitimacy of attributing to actions meanings they could not have had at the time. 25 Because Aristotle s notion of the polis differs from our concept of the state, it would perhaps be anachronistic to refer to his text as if it were a treatise on the state. Are the only legitimate readings those that evoke the intentions of the actors? Almost all attempts to address this question fall foul of a fallacy of textual meaning. 26 They proceed as if texts had intrinsic meanings, whether these meanings are single or plural. Much might be gained from insisting that meanings are always meanings 25. Skinner, Meaning and Understanding. Although Skinner presents himself as discussing anachronistic textual interpretations, I think he mistakes his target; his actual concern is anachronistic re-enactments. 26. Another issue in my debate with Ankersmit was the validity of equating meanings with the intentionality of individuals. See Bevir and Ankersmit, Exchanging Ideas.

13 36 mark bevir for people. A text is just a physical movement, ink on paper, or oil on canvas. A text gains meaning only if one or more individuals ascribes meaning to it. The grammar of our concepts precludes us from postulating meanings we cannot attribute to specific people. Although texts have meanings only for people, these people need not be the authors of the texts. They, including ourselves, might be readers. Thus, historians legitimately can attribute to texts meanings their authors, and even their author s contemporaries, could not have intended them to bear. Historians just have to be clear for whom the text had these meanings. Historians might say that Aristotle s text meant something to readers in the nineteenth century, or even that it means something to us, and they might do so even if that meaning is not one Aristotle or his contemporaries could plausibly have ascribed to the text. Re-enactment Perhaps problems of historical distance arise not because historians apply our concepts to the past, but because they ascribe to people beliefs that these people could not have entertained. Yet, we have no philosophical grounds for ruling out the possibility of someone having held a belief. We just have empirical grounds for regarding it as highly unlikely they did so. Properly speaking, therefore, anachronistic fallacies occur when we ascribe to people beliefs that empirically we believe it to be extraordinarily unlikely they held. Historical distance appears when historians use our concepts to refer to the rather different concepts they ascribe to people in the past. The analysis of historical distance remains complex even after we narrow it down to attempts to re-enact past beliefs. Complexities surface when we recall that past beliefs are not objects to which historians have direct access. They are objects historians postulate on the basis of evidence. Even more complexities surface once we realize the process of postulating beliefs inevitably creates a gap between these beliefs and the words in which they are expressed. When historians just record the words Aristotle used in his Politics, the result is a transcription; when historians postulate beliefs, they select the words to do so. In this respect, re-enactment is better described as ascription. We might distinguish, therefore, between the ascription of anachronistic beliefs and the use of anachronistic words to evoke beliefs. Only the former is a problem. Anachronistic errors arise when a historian ascribes to people beliefs about things that did not exist at the time they lived. But even these errors are sometimes just cases in which historians have not been sufficiently clear about the level of abstraction at which they are describing the relevant beliefs. For example, if historians write of Aristotle s view of the separation of powers, a critic may object that Aristotle could not have had beliefs about the separation of powers. If these historians are using the phrase separation of powers in a narrow sense to refer to the executive and judicial branches of government being institutionally distinct from the legislature, the critic would no doubt have an excellent point. However, if these historians are using the phrase in a more abstract sense to refer to constitutional theories in which no single body has the final say on all collective decisions, it seems far less clear that Aristotle did not hold the beliefs needed to consider

14 Why Historical Distance is not a Problem 37 such matters. The issue here is not re-enactment across historical distance but the adequacy of abstract concepts to more particular cases given certain purposes. IV. Conclusion I hope I have dispelled the problem of historical distance. How did I perform this trick? My general argument is that worries about historical distance arose only when modernist historicists wanted to secure their narratives by appealing to atomistic facts and rigorous methods. Modernists worried that distance from the facts might undermine the truth of a narrative. In sharp contrast, I argued that postfoundationalism undermines the idea of pure facts not just in historical theory but for all knowledge. It poses a general problem of how to define objective knowledge without appealing to pure facts. I suggested that we do so by conceiving of objective knowledge as a product of a comparison among the rival accounts on offer. This concept of objectivity removes the need for pure facts. It enables us to dispel worries about historical distance as a bewitching effect of the modernist idea of atomized facts. Postfoundationalism thereby overturns a common account of historical distance and anachronism. Historical distance is conceived in terms of the relationship between past objects and present contexts. Anachronism is typically thought to appear when an object is placed in an inappropriate context; the appearance of a wristwatch in a play about ancient Rome is a paradigmatic case. Yet, postfoundationalism suggests that we do not have objects and contexts with the degree of fixity presupposed by this analysis of anachronism. I thus transformed historical distance into a relationship between our concepts and the beliefs we ascribe to people in the past. When we think about historical distance in this way, three issues stand out. First, we need to clarify the conceptual reach of our concepts. I argued that we can rebut conceptual relativism using philosophical arguments about the grammar of our concepts. It is the apparently clear lack of universality of our concept of a wristwatch that would make the appearance of one in Julius Caesar liable to charges of pernicious anachronism. Second, we need to ask whose beliefs we want to narrate. I argued that we can legitimately ascribe to actions meanings they did not have at the time provided only that we are clear that the relevant meanings existed for later readers. A producer of Julius Caesar might defend the appearance of a wristwatch in the play by saying his production was about the meaning the play had for him as a story about absolute power. Finally, we need to ask how accurately our concepts capture the beliefs that we want to narrate. I argued that the requisite degree of accuracy varies with the purpose and level of abstraction of the narrative. A producer might argue that his production attempted to address questions of power at a sufficiently abstract level so as to translate what Shakespeare believed into our terms. University of California, Berkeley

15 本文献由 学霸图书馆 - 文献云下载 收集自网络, 仅供学习交流使用 学霸图书馆 ( 是一个 整合众多图书馆数据库资源, 提供一站式文献检索和下载服务 的 24 小时在线不限 IP 图书馆 图书馆致力于便利 促进学习与科研, 提供最强文献下载服务 图书馆导航 : 图书馆首页文献云下载图书馆入口外文数据库大全疑难文献辅助工具