Historical Experience as a Mode of Comprehension (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2017
In this interview, Jonathan Menezes asks Frank Ankersmit about various aspects of his theory of historical experience, focusing especially on his main book on the subject, Sublime Historical Experience (2005), but also on other writings in which he accounted for historical experience, like History and Tropology (1994) and Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (2012). The subjects addressed in the conversation include some of the existent criticism and polemic about this ‘experiential’ part of Ankersmit’s work; a new analysis of the relationship between Huizinga’s ‘historical sensation’ and Ankersmit’s ‘historical experience’; Ankersmit’s criticism of and attempt to go beyond Rorty and the so-called ‘linguistic transcendentalism’; and Ankersmit’s point of view on the connection between historical experience and the German historicist tradition.
Historical Experience Interrogated: A Conversation
Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2017
In this interview, Jonathan Menezes asks Frank Ankersmit about various aspects of his theory of historical experience, focusing especially on his main book on the subject, Sublime Historical Experience (2005), but also on other writings in which he accounted for historical experience, like History and Tropology (1994) and Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (2012). The subjects addressed in the conversation include some of the existent criticism and polemic about this ‘experiential’ part of Ankersmit’s work; a new analysis of the relationship between Huizinga’s ‘historical sensation’ and Ankersmit’s ‘historical experience’; Ankersmit’s criticism of and attempt to go beyond Rorty and the so-called ‘linguistic transcendentalism’; and Ankersmit’s point of view on the connection between historical experience and the German historicist tradition.
The journey from language to experience: Frank Ankersmit's lost "historical" cause
2010
My purpose in the researching and the writing of this thesis has been to investigate, and to try to explain, Frank Ankersmit's curious shift from his well expressed and firmly held narrativist position of "Narrative Logic", to an arguably contradictory, yet passionately held counter belief in the plausibility of a form of direct (sublime) historical experience - an authentic unmediated relationship with the past. I am, accordingly, presenting here what I believe to be the most adequate explanatory account of/for Ankersmit's intellectual journey. A journey which, in essence, constituted a substitution of his earlier representational, language centred philosophy of history for what might be taken as a new and mystical non-representational theory. This alternative theory of Ankersmit' s (let it be called this for now), lacking cognitive foundations, works on the basis of sensations, moods, feelings and therefore a consciousness deemed to be received directly from ...
2009
This paper analyzes key issues in the work of Frank Ankersmit: narrative, representation and sublime historical experience. It argues that his recent turn to experience marks a shift from an interest in narrative and the textual dimension of the past to an examination of the notion of an experience about the past. It suggests that although Ankersmit is usually associated with postmodernist avangardism in historical theory (narrativism, constructivism), as can be seen in his theory of historical representation, his understanding of the concept of historical experience and the sublime can be seen as regression. Thus, although Ankersmit had pushed historical theory beyond the linguistic turn, his most recent work can be understood as a return to a traditional Romantic view of immediate experience combined with an Enlightenment analysis of it.
The Expression of Historical Experience, History and Theory 54:2 (2015) 178-194
History and Theory, 2015
The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience, provides the condition of possibility of it, and thus, in a certain sense, produces it. Either you join forces with the few and opt for such mute experiences, or you go with the flow of narrative philosophy of history and the impossibility of immediacy. Either way, you end up postulating a mutual hostility between the nonlinguistic and language, and, more important, you remain unable to account for new insights and change. Contrary to this and in relation to history, I am going to talk about something nonlinguistic—historical experience—and about how such historical experience could productively interact with language in giving birth to novel historical representations. I am going to suggest that, under a theory of expression, a more friendly relationship can be established between experience and language: a relationship in which they are not hostile to but rather desperately need each other. To explain the occurrence of new insights and historiographical change, I will talk about a process of expression as sense-formation and meaning-constitution in history, and condense the theory into a struck-through “of,” as the expression of historical experience.
In a Parallel World: An Introduction to Frank Ankersmit's Philosophy of History
This article proposes to identify the conceptual structure guiding Frank Ankersmit's philosophy of history. We argue that philosophical analysis of history consists in Ankersmit's approach of three different levels: 1) the level of the past itself which is the subject of ontology, 2) the level of description of the past that is studied by epistemol-ogy, and 3) the level of representation of the past which should be analysed primarily by means of aesthetics. In other words, the realm of history is constituted of three aspects: 1) historical experience, 2) historical research, and 3) historical representation. During his whole academic career, Ankersmit has been interested in the first and the third aspects and has tried deliberately to avoid any serious engagement in epistemol-ogy (historical research). Ankersmit's philosophy of history is built on a few fundamental dichotomies that can be considered as a kind of axioms of his thinking: 1) the distinction between historical research and historical writing, and 2) the distinction between description and historical representation. The article offers a critical discussion of Ankersmit's two different approaches to the philosophy of history: cognitivist philosophy of history (analysis of historical representation) and existentialist philoso phy of history (analysis of historical experience), and concludes by a short overview of the impact and significance of his historical-philosophical work and of his idea of the uniqueness of history.
Historical experience is one of the most important topics of Frank Ankersmit's work. As we shall see in this article, 'historical experience' in the Ankersmitean sense is a rare and complex kind of experience, entirely different from the experiences we have in our daily lives, because it presupposes that a historian can be in direct contact with a past that is long gone. But can we really experience the past? How could a historian perform this? As Ankersmit has admitted, this impractical and unusual choice of experience as one of his theoretical guides is controversial, to say the least, especially among scholars strongly oriented by the linguistic turn, narrativism, postmodernism, and so on, because he claims that experience should have priority over language. In this article, the aim is to investigate some of the effects or the aftermaths of what I term 'the dawn of experience' in current theory and philosophy of history. The aim is also to question whether this dawn of experience necessarily means banishing language or representation. In my view, it does not, and experience presupposes a suspension of language, not a complete abandonment of it.
The Structure and Evolution of Koselleck's Theory of Historical Experience, in
Jeffrey Andrew Barach, Christoph Bouton, Servanne Jolivet (Hg.) Die Vergangenheit im Begriff Von der Erfahrung der Geschichte zur Geschichtstheorie bei Reinhart Koselleck, 2021
The debates on historical theory over the last years, above all since the 1970s, have revolved around two main themes that are somehow opposed and, at the same time, complementary. I am referring to what is usually considered the »linguistic turn in the philosophy of history « in the figure of so-called narrativism, on the one hand, and to the memorialist turn, on the other. The former has to do with the inevitably narrative structure of historical discourse, and it has challenged basic assumptions of the historiographical canon, particularly its purported similarity to scientific discourse and its claims to truth and objectivity. In its extreme versions, such as that of Hayden White, historiography is likened to a literary genre, where the boundaries between reality and fiction become blurred. On the other hand, the so-called »memory boom« (Jay Winter)2 has given a prominent place to the notions of memory, but it has also-in line with the debate on the significance of such events as the Shoah-led to a revision of the concepts of testimony and experience. This notion of experience suggests what we might call a third paradigm of the discussion, which I will address in the framework of Koselleck's thought, since it plays a central role in his historiographical theory. I will first analyze the concept of »space of experience« introduced in the 1975 article »›Space of Experience‹ and ›Horizon of Expectation‹: Two Historical Categories«3. Then I will trace Kosel-21
The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, Edited By Chiel van den Akker, Oxon/New York, Routledge, 2022, 2022
What specific sense does the concept of experience have for historians? What is constructed and what is given in historical experience? Is the very idea of an experience of the historical past meaningless? Whether it bears on the present or the past, all experience seems to be an experience of something (its ‘object’) by someone (its ‘subject). Who is the subject of an historical experience? Is it something strictly individual, or can it also be collective? And correlatively, what could the object of such a historical experience possibly be? Events? Processes? Epochs? Inversely, what is beyond all experience? Structures? Periods? These questions will be dealt within the frame of the theory of history. After having outlined the polysemy of the concept of experience, we will proceed from the most singular forms of experience to examine the different generalizations to which it gave rise: the experience of events by agents and witnesses (from lived history to remembered history), the experience of society by a group formulated in narratives (related history), the experience of historical time, of an epoch, the experience as learning from history (the practical past) and as a special knowledge of the past.