Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics - Hardcover

Roberts, David D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520200802 ISBN 13: 9780520200807

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

What is the role of history in our "postmetaphysical" age? Surveying two centuries of philosophical writing, David Roberts offers a thoughtful guide to the philosophy of history before the recent challenges associated with deconstructive postmodernism. He then argues for a moderate intellectual tradition in which historical knowledge, although freed from transcendent values, continues to play a crucial role in the conduct of human affairs.

Roberts's careful account of historicism explores the ideas of its major nineteenth-century representatives and foils, including Hegel, Dilthey, and Nietzsche. His thorough consideration of such twentieth-century thinkers as Gadamer, Croce, Foucault, and Heidegger contributes vitally to the ongoing discussions about the use and abuse of history. Certain to engage historians and philosophers, this book will interest scholars across the humanities who are concerned with the present and future utility of historical thinking.

About this title

About the Author

David D. Roberts is author of Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (California, 1987) and Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

From the Back Cover

"An admirable accomplishment. . . . Roberts provides valuable insights into the current debate on the nature of historical knowledge in our present 'postmodern' time. Anyone concerned with the philosophy of history will need to reckon with this book."―Allan D. Megill, author of Prophets of Extremity

From the Inside Flap

"An admirable accomplishment. . . . Roberts provides valuable insights into the current debate on the nature of historical knowledge in our present 'postmodern' time. Anyone concerned with the philosophy of history will need to reckon with this book."—Allan D. Megill, author of Prophets of Extremity

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics

By David D. Roberts

University of California Press

Copyright © 1995 David D. Roberts
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520200802
1
Postmetaphysical History A Difficult Adjustment

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.

Dissolving and Inflating the Historical

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 Nehamas's aestheticist reading of Nietzsche in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Richard Rorty's discussion of the category in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 119n.

Introducing the pioneering modernism of Vienna, Carl Schorske refers to "our century's ahistorical culture" almost in passing. See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1981), xviii.

had seemed deeply meaningful, grew blurry, and the focus shifted to subjective temporal experience or, at most, to one's own personal history. The advent of Freudian psychoanalysis has frequently been cited as the most significant example.5 In addition, the modernist use of simultaneity and collage seemed to challenge the notion of linear time and thus to undermine the confidence in linear narrative that was apparently essential to any historical approach.6

At the same time, the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century seem to have constituted such a rupture that history, with its connotations of continuity, coherence, and intelligibility, must surely diminish as a cultural component. In his widely admired The Great War and Modern Memory , Paul Fussell notes that World War I "was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place within a seamless, purposeful 'history' involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future."7 Especially insofar as "history" necessarily carries this particular baggage, it seems to have been undermined by the events of history itself in the twentieth century. Some insist that only literature, even if still in narrative form, can get at the real, lived reality of what is commonly taken as a historical experience or event, such as the First World War.8

Indeed, changes in the cultural situation seemed to thrust a new kind of leadership on the literary culture, even responsibility for what once seemed part of the historians' domain. The distinguished critic Harold Bloom noted this tendency with a certain grim resignation in the early 1970s, when he pondered the special difficulties we have come to encounter in conceiving the relationship between our present experience and our tradition or history:

The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature alone at the altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or priest. If he evades his burden by attempting to teach only the supposed presence of the present, he will find himself teaching only some simplistic, partial reduction that wholly

Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 63; Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna , chap. 4.

See, for example, Eugene Lunn's lucid discussion of this direction, especially as represented by Brecht and resisted by Lukács, in Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982), 48–55, 121–124. See also Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), 18, for a comparable argument about the impact of the modern media, especially television, in dehistoricizing our experience through simultaneity.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 21.

Modris Eksteins, in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 290–291, 296, argues explicitly that literary writers proved better able than historians to get at the reality of World War I. The war itself had undermined the historical imagination, so that history could not make sense of the experience.

obliterates the present in the name of one or another historicizing formula, or past injustice, or dead faith, whether secular or not. Yet how is he to teach a tradition now grown so wealthy and so heavy that to accommodate it demands more strength than any single consciousness can provide, short of the parodistic Kabbalism of a Pynchon?9

Only one chunk of the cultural terrain is at issue in this passage, and for Bloom responsibility for it falls to the literary culture by default, not as the booty of confident imperialist conquest. But the notion that literature must assume responsibility for a historical world grown too overwhelming for the competence of historians was central to the overall rethinking of cultural priorities.

If history was still to contribute to the wider culture, it seemed to need major recasting in light of the twentieth-century experience. Writing in 1966, Hayden White argued that "the historian serves no one well by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that which preceded it. On the contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot."10 But as even categories ancillary to historiography, such as continuity, chronology, and narrative, became suspect, the notion that "history" is ending, along with God, metaphysics, and the true world, became widespread in humanistic discussion.

Poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida were widely assumed to have shown "that there really is no such thing as 'history.'"11 All we can do is think instead in terms of sheer becoming, or mere flux, or slippage, or the play of differences. Throughout his Radical Hermeneutics , John D. Caputo falls back on the notion of "flux," which he takes to be a kind of neutral, premetaphysical category capable of withstanding even the postmodernist critical onslaught.12 It comes to seem that in shaping the formless ooze into "recorded history," we are simply seeking an antidote to "the primitive terror" we feel in the face of the real nothingness of the flux.13

Tainted with metaphysical prejudices, historical-mindedness came to seem but another Western pretense, even a form of domination by the winners, who

Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 39.

Hayden V. White, "The Burden of History," reprinted in his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 50.

David Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 48–49, referring to the stance of Foucault, Derrida, and "other modern Nietzscheans." See also pp. 59–60, and, in the same volume, Mark Philp, "Michel Foucault," 78–79, for further indications that any premium on continuity or tradition has come to seem conservative, limiting, even authoritarian.

John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); see, for example, pp. 97–98.

See T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971; orig. pub. 1943), 39, lines 96–103. See also hans Kellner's way of making the point in his "Beautifying the Nightmare: The Aesthetics of Postmodern History," Strategies 4–5 (1991): 292–293.

enforce remembrance of the course of the actual and forgetting of all the rest. History is always written by the victors, and victory conflates with domination and exclusion.14 From this perspective, any premium on historical thinking is inherently conservative, since it justifies the present power configuration by affording privilege to the course of the actual and thus the status quo.

However, another body of evidence suggests that what ends with the erosion of metaphysics is not history writ large but simply a certain approach to history—and a certain way of understanding our own place within our particular history. Our idea of history had indeed come to carry a good deal of metaphysical baggage, but to jettison that baggage may force us to take history seriously in ways inconceivable before.15

Recent antihistorical thinking often simply assumes that any notion of history must carry such baggage. There is a tendency to conflate the coherence and continuity that do seem necessary, if we are to speak of "history" at all, with the progressivism and even teleology that may not be. Indeed, postmetaphysical discussions of history persistently slip in G. W. F. Hegel at key junctures, as if a cultural emphasis on history necessarily entails Hegelian assumptions.16

The metaphysical tradition rested on the belief that, on some level, things are a certain way that we might discover, that there are stable, suprahistorical foundations or essences, origins or purposes, "firsts" or "ends." In one form or another, metaphysics seemed to specify a kind of container for all the variable and contingent stuff of history. For Rorty, in fact, traditional philosophy was fundamentally "an attempt to escape from history—an attempt to find nonhistorical conditions of any possible historical development."17 But if so, then something like history might seem what remains as, with the end of metaphysics, we recognize that any such suprahistorical realm is inaccessible, even inconceivable.

See especially Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–264. See also Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvízdala , trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1991), 166–167, for a more recent example of this tendency.

What it means "to take history seriously" is crucial. See David Couzens Hoy's way of framing the issue in "Taking History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 85–95.

For Michel Foucault, "our age . . . is attempting to flee Hegel." See "The Discourse on Language" (1970), published with The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, Colophon, 1976), 235. See also Megill, Prophets of Extremity , 186–187, on Foucault's enduring preoccupation with Hegel; and Vattimo, La fine della modernità , 10–17, on the effort to escape Hegel in Nietzsche and Heidegger. In questioning the Hegelian legacy, Jacques Derrida, like Vattimo, worried plausibly about the notion of Aufhebung , or "overcoming," but a sense that the ghost of Hegel lurked everywhere may have led these thinkers to load certain categories with unnecessary baggage. See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 25.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 9.

In one sense, the modern subjectivism that began with René Descartes was a new, more radical attempt at a suprahistorical metaphysics in the face of Renaissance skepticism. With the Cartesian recasting of Western philosophy, subjectivity or consciousness became the bedrock, that which could not be doubted. Taking form as the self or ego, subjectivity was a priori and somehow transcendent, capable of seeing the world whole, even mastering it.

In some of our accounts, to be sure, we accent the sense in which modern subjectivism was itself postmetaphysical. As the old metaphysics no longer seemed to hold, a new kind of humanism emerged, accenting the scope for human beings to make their own world on earth. Thus the Enlightenment project and the several political strands that followed from it; thus, eventually, the idea of progress and the particular relationship to history that it entailed. In this sense, the departure from antihistorical metaphysics involved embracing history as meaningful—as the arena for making the world, thereby creating or revealing ourselves. But even insofar as modern subjectivism entailed this premium on action in history, the ahistorical core of that tradition remained in place. The metaphysical tradition led us still to posit a universal rational standard, a congruence between mind and reality, and a direction, even a telos, to history itself.

What happens when "modernity," combining still-metaphysical assumptions with one brand of historical consciousness, loses its aura? Most basically, the subjective ego or consciousness no longer seems a priori and transcendent but is "thrown" into some particular context. And this means not only that individual subjectivity is always historically specific but also that my selfhood emerges only through the larger historical happening into which I am thrown. My self-understanding begins in a past I did not create and is projected into a future I cannot control.18 But it is equally crucial that with the waning of metaphysics, we cannot conceive this history as an overarching process of human self-realization, of "becoming what we are." Because there is no a priori human essence, there is no scope for fulfilling ourselves by overcoming some fragmentation or alienation.

So the subject is neither transcendent nor in process of self-realization but is rather bound up with some specific situation that is historical in a non-Hegelian sense. It would seem, then, that a post-Hegelian form of historical inquiry might replace subjectivity or consciousness as the key to self-understanding.

From within the modern framework, "modern" was an honorific term expressing our sense of ourselves as the privileged culmination of a benign historical process. The West was superior, and Western modernity was the culmination of human development, because scientific reason afforded a

Georgia Warnke makes the point nicely in specifying the central Heideggerian insight influencing Hans-Georg Gadamer. See her Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 40.

privileged access to the truth of things—and thus an increasing technological mastery of the world. But on this level, too, we come to seem more significantly bound up with history as our modern world comes to seem merely a contingent historical resultant, "modern" in no more than a neutral chronological sense and certainly not metaphysically privileged. As modernity loses its aura, we become postmodern, relating to our earlier pretensions in a newly self-conscious way, perhaps through parody or nostalgia.19 But the res gestae, the stuff history deals with, still may be sufficiently coherent to make possible historical inquiry, and such inquiry may have deeper cultural import precisely insofar as history is not progressive, with an a priori frame.

For over a century, those assaulting the metaphysical tradition have found themselves face-to-face with something like history—but not the history that nineteenth-century advocates of a historical approach had in mind. Even as he deplored the implications of the hypertrophy of one kind of historical consciousness, Nietzsche reduced reality to perpetual becoming and emphasized the contingent constructedness of the worlds we fashion for ourselves. By the first decade of the century, Croce was submerging philosophy within history as he sought to posit an absolute historicism. Heidegger thought through first the centrality of historicity to human living, then the particularity of our world as a purely historical resultant. By midcentury, Wittgenstein had reacted against his earlier attempt to provide a suprahistorical map of language and was suggesting that, on every level, we may alter or devise the rules as we go along, subject to the historically specific form of life in which we find ourselves. A bit later, Thomas Kuhn modestly proposed "a role for history" even in the self-understanding of the natural sciences, thereby initiating one of the most fruitful discussions of the century. By the 1980s, Robert C. Solomon was offering a strikingly contemporary Hegel whose "closing" telos proves the empty yet liberating awareness that the world is perpetually incomplete; Michael Ryan was suggesting that "history" is another name for the undecidability that Derrida allots us; and Richard Rorty, underscoring the historical contingency of what once seemed the inevitable philosophical problems, was proposing that history affords the only therapy when we find ourselves intellectually befuddled. More recently still, Brook Thomas concluded that, with the end of all we have encompassed under the term "metaphysics," ours is "a historically contingent world" in which "there are only historical ways of knowing."20

Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; orig. French ed. 1979) focused attention on these possibilities within the postmodern discussion.

Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 14–16, 636–637; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, n.d.), no. 83 (p. 39e); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 21; Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 215–216. I discuss Rorty in chap. 10.

Examples could be multiplied, and, though disparate, they have a significant family resemblance. For a hundred years, some have suggested that as we cease to believe in foundations, essences, or "metanarratives," we are left with a world that is particular and provisional, endlessly differing, forever incomplete; ever more of reality seems but a contingent historical resultant. A kind of "inflation of history" or "reduction to history" seems to have been at work. With the dissolution of metaphysics, history could no longer be understood simply as the mundane testing ground specified in our religious tradition, or as the revelation or dramatization of truths, principles, or values already there, or as the path to a goal given beforehand. Rather, history was left standing alone, naked, for the first time—as all there is.

But whether what is left can usefully be termed "history" obviously depends on the baggage the term must carry. Perhaps, to avoid metaphysical heresies, we must settle for empty becoming, or, with Caputo, mere flux. However, it is possible that we must understand the world more fully as "historical" than ever before, but "historical" in a new, "weak" way in the absence of metaphysical buttressing.21 Even if we find ourselves doing so, however, it is not obvious how the human relationship to such a world is to be conceived. Nor is it clear how we might respond to a purely historical world. A simple dichotomy between pro- and antihistory does not seem sufficient to sort out the cultural directions that have opened in response to this inflation of history.

At this point, it is enough simply to grasp the overall line of questioning that these preliminaries suggest. If our conventional ways of understanding history prove to rest on outmoded metaphysical assumptions, are we left with sheer becoming, mere flux, or the play of differences, or can we make new sense of history, both as a conception of what "there is" and as a mode of inquiry and understanding? If our world seems to reduce to nothing but history, what is the range of plausible responses? Does the mix of extremity and aestheticism rest on a fair reading of the possibilities, or has there been something prejudicial about the way the alternatives have been sorted out? What is the scope for a moderate, constructive orientation toward history within a postmetaphysical culture, and how would any such orientation relate to the extremes?

The notion of "weakness" in recent humanistic discussion is associated especially with the Italian Gianni Vattimo, whose thinking derives from his innovative and illuminating synthesis of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For a good brief introduction, see his "Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole," in Il pensiero debole , ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983), 12–28. In English, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture , trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; orig. Italian ed. 1985). Although I am indebted to Vattimo's work, I depart from his position in accenting the divergence between Nietzsche and Heidegger within the postmetaphysical space, as well as the scope for a constructive alternative between the extremes they were the first to establish. Thus my use of the term "weak" is not precisely congruent with Vattimo's.

Expansion and Polarization in Empirical Historiography

Although the growing theoretical ferment, with its apparent extravagance and apocalyptic aura, put off many practicing historians, changes in the wider intellectual framework clearly had implications for the cultural place of empirical historiography. And by the late 1980s, interest in theoretical matters was growing remarkably within the historical profession. But because departures that some found exciting and liberating seemed, to others, to compromise historiography's cultural role, the most obvious result was polarization between an assertive "new," or postmodern, history and a defensive "old," or modern, history.

The points at issue followed first from the most striking feature of historical writing in recent decades—the expansion of the range of questions asked by practicing historians. That expansion was associated initially with the new social history, which focused on neglected groups and ordinary people. But as the expansion proceeded to encompass adolescence and retirement, sexuality and gender roles, it became clear that the wider inflation of history was at work. It had become possible—and necessary—to ask an expanding range of historical questions as ever more of what shapes the lives of all of us came to seem contingent, constructed, merely historical. At the same time, historical questions, often radical and particularly fruitful, were increasingly raised from outside the historical profession, most notably by philosophers. The efforts of those like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty suggested that with the waning of metaphysics, even what had seemed the stuff of philosophy required a kind of historical questioning.22

To some, postmodernism portended a further expansion by freeing the historian from "modern" limitations on ways of approaching and representing history. Departure from the pretense of a single master narrative entailed a welcome pluralism, an opening to the stories of long-excluded others. There was much interest in the "microhistories" of those like Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, which turned from what had seemed the master process, culminating in the present, to focus on the marginal or anecdotal. These histories afforded access to mentalities and worlds of experience somehow hidden before. This direction converged in some respects with the "new historicism" that Stephen Greenblatt and others were developing from within literary studies.

But though this expansion suggested a broader cultural role for historical

See, for example, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Although his aims were decidedly antihistoricist, the work of Alasdair MacIntyre similarly appeals to historical argument and stresses the import of the contingent historical level. See especially his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

understanding, it also raised troubling questions about criteria of significance and hierarchies of importance. Some worried that if, as this expansion suggested, history can be about anything at all, historical writing was in danger of lapsing into triviality. It became ever more difficult for the wider public to know what was important, and some worried that the historians were losing their audience, becoming culturally marginal.23 Yet demands for a clear hierarchy of importance or a unified "master narrative" seemed to others to be inherently authoritarian—attempts to justify some actual state of affairs and preclude alternatives. So even as historiography radically expanded, there were calls for still greater pluralism and openness.

There was polarization especially because the effort to expand the focus led some to embrace epistemological innovations from the wider discussion. With the erosion of metaphysics, historians could no longer be conceived as disinterested inquirers representing the past as it actually happened. Thus they could play a more active, creative role, asking new kinds of questions based on their own present concerns. Joan Wallach Scott found in the French poststructuralists Foucault and Derrida the keys to the "new epistemology" that she found necessary for a more significant feminist history. For Scott, it was time to come to terms not only with the historian's present involvement but also with the contested, broadly political nature of the process through which some subjects come to be studied at the expense of others.24

Changes in the accents of the theory or philosophy of history pointed in the same direction. During the 1950s and 1960s, the analytical philosophy of history, assessing the truth value of historical claims against the model of the natural sciences, dominated historiographical discussion. That enterprise could be reassuring, as it showed how causation and explanation function in historiography, or disturbing, insofar as it showed why history was inherently incapable of measuring up to the model of the real sciences. But beginning with Hayden White's pathbreaking Metahistory in 1973, a new current concerned with textuality, language, rhetoric, and narrative gradually established its predominance, shifting the basis of comparison for historiography from science to art.

White drew on literary theorists from Northrop Frye to Roland Barthes, and his work brought together theoretically minded historians, philosophers of history, and literary intellectuals in an interdisciplinary discussion with wide resonance. Although their accents differed, these narrativists deepened consideration of the historian's active role by examining the process through which the "archive," the stuff of the past, gets constructed, through language, into a recognizably historical account. Historical texts are emplotted in

On the concern about splintering and loss of focus, see the lucid discussion by the social historian Olivier Zunz in his introduction to Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History , ed. Olivier Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), esp. pp. 4–6.

Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1–11, esp. p. 4.

narratives just like fictional texts. To write a history is to construct one kind of story, not to represent the past as it actually happened.

In confronting historians with the constructedness of their own histories, narrativists like White and Hans Kellner claimed to be freeing historiography to play a more fruitful cultural role. Following Barthes, especially, they tended to find the notions of "truth" and "reality," long central to the self-understanding of historians, to be not merely irrelevant but to constitute an authoritarian obstacle to the more open, pluralistic kind of historiography they envisioned. Kellner noted, almost casually, that "'Truth' and 'Reality' are, of course, the primary authoritarian weapons of our time."25

With their tendency to portray historical writing as one kind of fiction, these narrativists fostered a kind of aestheticism, which meshed interestingly with the neopragmatist accents of Richard Rorty and the political emphases of historians like Scott. By undercutting the authoritarian ideal of a single true account, this direction seemed to invite a more creative and pluralistic historiography, welcoming many stories, including the stories of those others long excluded from the mainstream master narrative. As the old imperatives of detachment and objectivity became suspect, innovators like White and Scott seemed to invite historians to become presentist and political with a good conscience.26

To his book on language and historical representation, Kellner added a deliberately provocative subtitle—Getting the Story Crooked —that mocked the ideal of "getting the story straight" that had long seemed essential to the historians' self-understanding. And he noted that the new scrutiny of the historians' discourse, a scrutiny formerly reserved for novels, "must generate a certain anxiety in a profession whose identity is based upon precisely the distinction between its own prose and that of the writer of fiction."27

Such anxiety there was, and it fueled some concerted attempts at resistance by more conventional historians. Because White's emphasis on rhetorical categories in Metahistory seemed to come at the expense of any concern for truth, the historians among his critics found his strategy incongruent with his stated aim to free history to play a more central cultural role.28 If history writing

Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 301; see also p. 24. For the Barthes argument so central to Kellner and other narrativists, see especially Roland Barthes, "Historical Discourse," trans. Peter Wexler, in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 145–155, esp. p. 154.

Peter Novick notes "the casual, matter-of-fact fashion" in which new historians like Scott "signaled their abandonment of traditional objectivist axioms." See That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 598.

Kellner, Language and Historical Representation , 292.

For example, Arnaldo Momigliano, "The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White's Tropes," in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook , vol. 3, ed. E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 259–268. See also Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice," Poetics Today 9, no. 2 (1988): 449.

merely provides a story that seems true because of certain rhetorical conventions, why should anybody pay attention to it, especially when the novelists generally manage to construct more engaging stories? Reflecting the concerns of many mainstream historians, Gordon S. Wood worried, and Oscar Handlin insisted, that historical writing must rest on precisely the old-fashioned "positivism," with its ideal of a stable, objective truth, that was falling into disrepute in the wider humanistic culture.29

In the same way, traditionalists worried that the accent on presentism and political commitment invited histories that simply confirm the starting point of the inquirer. Even as historical understanding seems to become more central, doubts about the scope for genuinely learning from historical accounts may lead us to listen only to what we want to hear. Charging those like Scott with violating the past for present political purposes, Gertrude Himmelfarb invoked the long-standing historiographical imperative, insisting that when we look into the past, it is their history we should be seeking—and seeking to re construct.30

By the end of the 1980s, there was much interest in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream , which made it clear that concerns about involvement, relativism, and truth have come up periodically in the American historical profession, especially as historiography sought self-understanding in a culture dominated by the image of the natural sciences. Novick brought the discussion up to date in a somewhat resigned spirit, for he worried that the founding ideals of the discipline were at last dissolving for good, with very little chance of recovery. It was widely viewed as symptomatic when Simon Schama, a distinguished Harvard historian known for, among other attributes, his abilities as a story-teller, overtly blended what seemed fact with what seemed fiction in Dead Certainties , published in 1991. Schama's book not only blurred the genres but, as he himself put it, "deliberately dislocated the conventions by which histories establish coherence and persuasiveness."31

In a sharply critical review, Gordon Wood traced Schama's effort to the fashionable postmodernist and deconstructionist theories of the day. And for Wood, those theories threatened to undermine the fragile, historically specific conventions essential to the integrity of historiography, because once such blurring of history and fiction is allowed, we can never be sure which is which in any account, and we come to doubt the truthfulness of the whole.32 Wood's effort to resist these tendencies reflected the stubborn insistence of the

Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 405; see also pp. 100–101, 118, 157, 377. Gordon S. Wood, contribution to "Writing History: An Exchange," New York Review of Books , 16 December 1982, 59.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Some Reflections on the New History," American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 665–670; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 15–24.

Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1992), 321.

Gordon S. Wood, "Novel History," New York Review of Books , 27 June 1991, 12, 15.

traditionalists that, though historians, too, tell stories, historical inquiry can get at truth, or reality, in a way that literature does not and that the distinction remains culturally central.

There was dispute not only between innovators and traditionalists; the innovators themselves fell out over some of the central points at issue. White found something facile about the "new historicist" reaction against formalism or structuralism, while proponents of postmodernism found quite different implications for historiography.33 And Dominick LaCapra, who was central in mediating Derrida, Gadamer, and others to intellectual historians, sharply criticized Carlo Ginzburg's widely admired microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms , and, especially, the arguments used by proponents of the microhistorical approach. With unconcealed bitterness, LaCapra noted that though these historians claim to resist hegemonies and to open up historiography, their way of affording privilege to oral, popular culture

functions to reinforce hegemonic relations in professional historiography. If a certain level of culture represents primordial reality, then it is a very short step to the assumption that those who study it are the 'real' historians, those who focus on the most important things. . . . [A] number of historians have taken this step. The result is a bizarre and vicious paradox whereby a vicarious relation to the oppressed of the past serves as a pretext for contemporary pretensions to dominance.34

So despite the promise of a renewed self-understanding and a deeper cultural role, the efforts of those from White and Scott to Ginzburg and Schama provoked confusion and polarization among historians. Many simply turned away from the wider discussion, shaking their heads. The more combative among them—Himmelfarb, most notably—attacked the whole litany from White to Scott to Schama.35 It was plausible for these traditionalists to worry that something still viable and useful was in danger of being undermined. But in pulling back from humanistic theory, they tended to repair to positions that were no longer defensible, in light of the wider assault on metaphysics and epistemology. The question was whether historiography necessarily rested on the loosely positivist ideal of representing a determinate past object, as the traditionalists assumed, or whether the wider cultural break afforded a new basis

Hayden V. White, "New Historicism: A Comment," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 293–302. On the implications of postmodernism for historiography, compare, for example, the accents of F. R. Ankersmit's "Historiography and Postmodernism," History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989): 137–153, with those of Jane Caplan's "Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians," Central European History 22, nos. 3–4 (September–December 1989): 260–278.

Dominick LaCapra, "The Cheese and the Worms : The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian," in his History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 45–69. The quotation is from p. 69.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Telling It as You Like It: Post-Modernist History and the Flight from Fact," TLS: The Times Literary Supplement , 16 October 1992, 12–15.

for the long-standing sense that history writing is a vehicle for truth in a way that fictional writing is not. Some of those who intervened in the discussion, like Thomas Haskell, responding to Peter Novick, and Nancy Struever, responding to Sande Cohen, contributed elements for such an alternative, but those elements did not coalesce effectively.36

The uncertainties in historiography plugged into the wider discussion especially through the tension-ridden relationship between past and process, or how we of the present are connected with all that came before us. That relationship was at issue both in the concern about principles of selection and criteria of significance and in the concern about presentism, detachment, and the scope for truth. Much rests on why, in light of the wider eclipse of metaphysics, we might focus on the dominant processes, resulting in the actual world, and why we might resist, focusing instead on the stories of those others who lived outside, or who themselves resisted, or who were submerged by those dominant processes.

The relationship between past and process had been problematic even as history established itself as a distinct professional discipline in the nineteenth century. But from Leopold von Ranke's reaction against Hegel to Herbert Butterfield's assault on the Whigs, historians came to a loose consensus around the imperative to get at the past "on its own terms," even "for its own sake." This entailed both a self-effacing disengagement and a deemphasis on process, or the connectedness between the present and the past. To emphasize the involvement of the inquirer, or to feature those aspects of the past that served some process to the present, was to invite anachronism or a priori schematism—and to do violence to the past as contemporaries lived it.

Yet innovators like White and Scott insist that historical writing is necessarily presentist, constructivist, and political and thus entails some particular connection between the present and past. They seemed to mainstream historians too quick to play down the truth-value of historical writing, which seemed to blur with literature, on the one hand, and with political propaganda, on the other. To address the central question about the scope for truth, we need to consider the relationship between historical inquiry and action in light of the various ways we might relate to both past and process in a postmetaphysical world.

A Historical Approach to the Changing Culture of History

In the rough-and-tumble of contemporary debate, we sometimes neglect the obvious point that, whatever the questions raised about history as a mode of inquiry, our present intellectual situation is the resultant of our own intellectual

Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990): 129–157; Nancy S. Struever, review of Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline, New Vico Studies 5 (1987): 193–195.

history. As participants in that continuing history, we have come to formulate particular ways of understanding the processes to which we ourselves belong—and thus particular ways of understanding our present possibilities. And our ways of doing so have rested on particular ways of understanding the history in which we are enmeshed.

The uncertainties and conflations noted above suggest that as a result of our reading of the history so far, our conception of cultural possibilities may be unnecessarily restrictive. And a fresh look at certain steps in our intellectual history might clarify the scope for a historical strand in a postmetaphysical culture. The clarification must be historical because the contingencies have mattered; it matters who confronted whom as metaphysics and modernity were undermined and as particular alternatives began to be offered. Any effort at historical clarification is obviously treacherous, however, because history itself, its status and the baggage it must carry, has been so centrally at issue.

Much recent thinking rests on our understanding of what happened at the juncture encompassing the breakdown of the Hegelian synthesis, the crisis of the first historicism, and our departure from the "great age of history" by the early twentieth century.37 There seems to have been a kind of pivot at that point, but its character is hard to decipher. On the one hand, there was a reaction against the premium on historical approaches that had come to mark the nineteenth century. On the other hand, there was a kind of "inversion" leading, as Rorty has put it, to an "exaltation of flux over permanence."38 Thinkers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead tended toward this sort of reversal, which was to posit another metaphysics, taking duration, flux, or process as ultimately real. Others, like Edmund Husserl, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Heinrich Rickert, were so troubled by the relativistic implications of nineteenth-century historicism that they sought new modes of access to something suprahistorical, stable, and certain.

But at about the same time, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger began exploring a different set of possibilities. For each, the eclipse of metaphysics or transcendence meant, as a first approximation, the historicizing of the world, of reality itself. Each embraced the historicity of things as their contemporaries did not. At issue was not simply an abstract intellectual reorientation but a new experience requiring a personal and cultural response. And though they represent a common departure, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger experienced the intrusiveness of history differently, so each proposed, in response, a different mode of relating to the world as historical. Nietzsche and Heidegger explored

See, for example, Richard Rorty's "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism" (1980), reprinted in his Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 139–159. See also Herbert Schnädelbach, Geschichtsphilosophie nach Hegel: Die Probleme des Historismus (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1974), which posits a sequence of ultimately unsatisfactory efforts to confront the problems that first emerged with nineteenth-century historicism.

Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 118n. Rorty found this tendency's "least common denominator" in the thinking of Nietzsche, James, and Bergson.

contrasting extremes, while Croce sought a kind of middle ground, though he had something important in common with both Nietzsche and Heidegger vis-à-vis the other.

At the same time, however, there were tensions, limitations, and contingencies in the legacies of all three thinkers, so the story hardly stops with them. In different ways, thinkers like José Ortega y Gasset, R. G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Walter Benjamin explored some of the same terrain. But there has been particular significance to the more recent efforts of Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty to address many of the same issues as foundationalist metaphysics has continued to erode. In recasting hermeneutics, structuralism, and pragmatism, these thinkers confronted the dissolution of all that had seemed to make the world stable on some privileged, suprahistorical level; in the process, each took up aspects of the ambiguous legacy of Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger, though they did so in their own particular, contingent ways.

Croce has not been prominent in recent efforts to assess the postmetaphysical situation, but some of those responding to the inflation of history have shared his assumptions and offered comparable prescriptions. Gadamer, especially, came to represent, in recast form, some of what Croce was the first to interject into the discussion.39 Partly because of what he learned from Heidegger, Gadamer's hermeneutics can cover some of the most glaring deficiencies in Croce, while Croce's absolute historicism can help box out certain contingent ambiguities in Gadamer.

Still, Croce and Gadamer were both prejudicially conservative in important respects, and even taken together they leave tensions and ambiguities. The story grows more interesting, but also more complex, when we add the forms of deconstruction associated with Foucault and Derrida, each of whom embraced the Nietzschean and Heideggerian legacies to show the scope for a new and radical kind of historical questioning. But though the issue has been much discussed, the area of intersection between hermeneutics and deconstruction has been especially difficult to map, partly because deconstruction has itself seemed to entail conflicting impulses. Its premium on playful or ritualistic disruption may undermine any chance for radical historical questioning to serve ongoing reconstruction.

Some of those seeking a more constructive postmetaphysical orientation

Gadamer's recasting of hermeneutics rested partly on encounter with Collingwood's logic of question and answer, which specified the present's central role in constituting a particular past and which had been developed from Crocean notions. Thus it was partly under Croce's indirect influence that Gadamer moved beyond the older understanding of "historicism," as the imperative to get at the past on its own terms or as the quest for the correct method of historical understanding. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science , trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 45–47. In addition to Gadamer and Rorty, with whom I will compare Croce explicitly, see David Kolb's conclusion to The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), for a good example of a generally Crocean orientation in a thinker seeking to sidestep Hegel yet avoid the Heideggerian extreme.

embraced Rorty's neopragmatism, which claimed kinship with aspects of Gadamerian hermeneutics and which had an unacknowledged kinship with Crocean historicism as well.40 And Rorty sometimes suggested that with the eclipse of metaphysics, historical orientation becomes the cultural core, that a radical kind of historical questioning might do for the culture what philosophy could not. Still, partly because of new preoccupations that open with the inflation of history, he, too, offered an ambiguous mixture, an aestheticized pragmatism emphasizing the scope for creating fictions for particular purposes, especially personal edification. Such accents compromised the renewed emphasis on historical approaches that he otherwise seemed to invite.

Although none of them merits the last word, there is much to be learned by treating Nietzsche, Croce, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty in tandem. Together they enable us to stake out the terrain of postmetaphysical history and to assess the possibilities within it. It is worth concentrating on these thinkers even at the expense of others—W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson, for example—whose assault on foundationalist metaphysics has had implications for the status of history but who have been less explicitly concerned with wider cultural implications.41 Those in the Anglo-American tradition have been less prone to view the break from metaphysics as fundamental to the culture and to feel its consequences in a deeply personal way. Part of what distinguishes Rorty himself is his determination to think through the wider implications of that break, and he has taken good advantage of recent Anglo-American philosophy in doing so, even as he has also attuned himself to the various Continental explorations of the postmetaphysical terrain.

The sequence from Nietzsche to Rorty has been prominent in establishing our sense of the cultural situation, yet the chips are still falling, and such contemporaries as Christopher Norris, John D. Caputo, David Couzens Hoy, Allan Megill, Brook Thomas, and F. R. Ankersmit have sought to explore the connections and implications as the discussion has continued. Our continuing intellectual history embraces their efforts—and whatever contribution this study can make. In light of the prominence that the extremes have assumed in discussions

See, for example, Christopher Butler's way of embracing neopragmatism in his Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology: An Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

In Essays on Heidegger , 110n., Rorty notes that Quine and Davidson "do not share Heidegger's sense of 'Western metaphysics' as pervasive and all-encompassing. So their polemics lack the apocalyptic tone common to late Heidegger and early Derrida." Still, the work of Davidson, especially, has been central to the recent phase of the assault on the metaphysical tradition, with its various dualisms. See especially his noted essay "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (1974), reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 183–198, which opposes the dualism of conceptual scheme and reality, or world, or content, and the conceptual relativism that results from such dualisms. In pointing away from the notion that language necessarily distorts reality, Davidson posits the coherence necessary to conceive the postmetaphysical world as continuous and, ultimately, historical.

of postmetaphysical possibilities, I will be concerned especially to identify the elements that might serve a moderate alternative and, more particularly, to show why such a moderate strand entails a constructive role for historical understanding. Those elements are to be found interspersed with more extreme responses to the world as historical, responses that turn from any constructive engagement with history and that may even undermine any premium on empirical historiography.

Helpful as it might be, however, any such constructive culture of history could not supplant, but could only stand in tension with, the array of extremes that first began to emerge in the responses of Nietzsche and Heidegger. A postmetaphysical culture of history would surely entail an unstable field of forces, and that whole field requires our attention.

We must also note that the inflation of history has bred resistance throughout the century, and even on this level the discussion continues. In some prominent instances, that resistance was relatively traditionalist and, in our terms, still metaphysical. Thus, for example, the explicitly antihistoricist ideas of Karl Löwith, Guido de Ruggiero, and Leo Strauss, based on religious or classical natural law positions. Moreover, in light of the decay of the first positivism, there were renewed attempts to ground science as a cultural core. First neo-Kantianism and then the neopositivism of the Vienna Circle developed partly in response to the cultural disarray that the intrusiveness of history seemed to entail.

The Marxist tradition proved another important source of resistance, although its relationship to the cultural direction at issue in this study has been especially elusive. Marx's departure from Hegel may seem a step from a stillmetaphysical conception of history—abstract, idealist, speculative, totalist—to one that is concrete, down-to-earth, praxis-oriented, and open-ended. Yet by the 1920s, the most innovative Marxists, seeking to scrape away the limiting encrustations of materialism and economic determinism, were accenting Marxism's Hegelian underpinnings, which seemed to invite a greater role for consciousness, culture, and freedom. In this form, Marxism came to seem more open-ended and historicist. In recent discussion, moreover, critics generally within the Marxist tradition have attacked poststucturalism for its apparently antihistorical tendencies.42

Certainly Marxism, in principle, might present itself as radically historicist, insofar as it simply claimed to offer, through its critical account of the

See, for example, Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983). In the United States, leftists like Fredric Jameson and Frank Lentricchia offered the most pointed arguments, in the face of poststructuralism, for the continued centrality of a historical approach. See Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, "Introduction: Posing the Question," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–11, for a good introduction to this confrontation.

historically specific constellation of capitalism, the most convincing diagnosis of present problems and prescription for solution. In competing with alternative diagnoses and prescriptions, such a Marxism would understand itself as participating in an ongoing conversation; it would remain willing to learn—and even to change with the growth of the world. But despite tendencies in this direction, twentieth-century Marxism has continued to rest on an extra dimension, the claim to a privileged, suprahistorical grasp of the a priori structure and direction of history itself. This entailed a certain way of understanding differentiation and conflict, as well as an image of wholeness, or "totality," as the culmination of history.43 Whatever the obstacles to its practical realization, the notion of "emancipation" remained fundamental to the coherence and distinctiveness of Marxism. And emancipation meant not simply the overcoming of one historically specific configuration but a qualitative departure from the limiting structures of all of history as we have known it so far. The claim to a suprahistorical grasp of the course of history justified a claim to privilege in diagnosis and prescription that seemed to warrant devaluing opposing accounts a priori.

In the final analysis, then, what Marxism claimed to offer was not simply a historically specific critique of capitalist civilization but a particular conception of history, still deeply Hegelian. Insistence on this point, it must be emphasized, does not necessarily entail criticism of Marxism, let alone refutation; it is simply to say that even as it began to be recast by the 1920s, Marxism must be seen as resisting, not contributing to, the more radically historicist direction in twentieth-century culture.

But it might still be possible to resist the historicizing tendency by developing a modified suprahistorical framework not subject to the charges that could be brought against metaphysics and Hegelianism. Among efforts in this direction, the most prominent has been Jürgen Habermas's quest for a universal pragmatics, which was stimulated in part by the historicist relativism that seemed to lurk in Gadamer's recasting of hermeneutics. Indeed, Habermas disputed the premises of several of the major figures in this study and pinpointed what may indeed be elements of overreaction in their thinking.44 While accepting much of the historicizing tendency, he wanted to retain the scope for critique, to specify criteria of rationality, and to save at least the ideal of

See John E. Grumley, History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault (London: Routledge, 1989), esp. pp. 62–63, 150–151, 206, for a sympathetic commentator's assessment of the ongoing ambiguities within Marxism over the question of totality and completion, as well as Martin Jay's masterly Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984), on the whole issue.

See especially Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures , trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987; orig. German ed. 1985). Habermas's debate with Gadamer is discussed in chap. 7, below.

emancipation. Habermas's prominence reminds us that the effort to conceive the relationship between what changes and what does not is still very much in progress. At the same time, however, his preoccupations make clear how central to our cultural experience the effort to come to terms with the historicizing tendency has been.

Continues...

Excerpted from Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysicsby David D. Roberts Copyright © 1995 by David D. Roberts. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520200802
• ISBN 13: 9780520200807
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 342