Der Briefwechsel: 1953–1983 | Reinhart Koselleck e Carl Schmitt || Der Begriff der Politik: Die Moderne als Krisenzeit im Werk von Reinhart Kosellec | Genaro Imbriano

KOSELECK Reinhart e SHMITT Carl Reinhart Koselleck
Reinhart Koselleck e Carl Schmitt | Fotos: Neue Bürcher Zeitung e Prodavinci

Der Briefwechsel Reinhart KoselleckThe correspondence between the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) and the radical-conservative legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) is certain to attract scholarly attention—and to produce expectations. So far, we have only caught unsystematic glimpses of these theorists’ private exchanges, which began in the early 1950s. Scholarship on Koselleck, particularly Niklas Olsen’s History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck and Gennaro Imbriano’s Der Begriff der Politik: Die Moderne als Krisenzeit im Werk von Reinhart Koselleck, which is under review here, has utilized the correspondence and related archival sources, albeit noncomprehensively and without assessing their overall import for the Schmitt/Koselleck question.1 With the letters now made available in 2019’s Der Briefwechsel: 1953–1983, edited by Jan Eike Dunkhase, the wider (German-speaking) audience can form its own opinions about the thinkers’ relationship and assess their similarities and differences. Leia Mais

Giambattista Vico and the new Psychological Science | Luca Tateo

Filosofia e Historia da Biologia Reinhart Koselleck
Luca Tateo | Foto: TPGC |

SCOTT The common wind 2 Reinhart KoselleckAlthough scholarship on Giambattista Vico’s New Science includes a wide range of approaches, it has never experienced a paradigm shift so radical that it cannot be understood within the epistemic assumptions of the Western intellectual tradition. The publication of Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science, edited by Luca Tateo, promises to do just that. The volume is a collection of seven essays, and it belongs to the History and Theory of Psychology series, which is edited by Jaan Valsiner. The ambitious aims of this book are elaborated in Valsiner’s fore- word, Waldomiro Silva Filho’s introduction, and Tateo’s preface and conclusion. For Valsiner, the series responds to the question, “how is psychology a science?” (vii). According to Silva Filho, this question is problematized by contemporary conflicts between “radical physicalist reductionism and the most liberal cultural relativism”—the former is the “tendency to reduce psychological processes to . . . the biochemistry of the brain” and the latter is postmodern criticism (xviii). The book’s contributors look to Vico to counter these dangers.

Tateo became interested in Vico as an ancestor of cultural psychology and as the first to challenge the dominant Cartesian epistemology. According to Tateo, Vico provided an “alternate epistemology,” one that was “anthropocentric in the sense that we know human nature as we share it and through the historical genesis of its products” (xii). Indeed, Vico replaced the “myth of the given” in “psychological epistemology” with poiesis, an imaginative activity that creates human meaning (211). Tateo says that Vico’s emphasis on the imagination pro- vided “a way to intersubjectively access the mental and emotional processes that are behind the products of human activity,” representing a shift in focus, episte- mology, and methodology in psychological science (xiii). Imaginative universals gave Vico a qualitative methodology through which to understand the sensuous construction of meaning; indeed, they “embody” meaning and start with the “uni- versality of human body” and the “universality of imaginative construction[s]” of cultural forms (viii). But do imaginative universals allow us to “intersubjectively access mental and emotional processes” (xiii) or, as Valsinor says in the fore- word, is “the sensuality of the body—relating with environment—the guarantee of generalization” (viii)? Does the “‘hermetically constructed unity’ (as John Shotter points out in this book) transcend our usual classificatory tendencies of contrasting ‘verbal’ and ‘nonverbal’ meaning-making means” (viii-ix)?

The contributors to this volume are correct about Vico’s emphasis on imagina- tion, poiesis, and the “sensuality of the body.” However, the incongruities inher- ent in their contributions are troubling, particularly insofar as they concern these authors’ understandings of the radical nature of what Vico meant by imagination, imaginative universals, poiesis, and embodiment. These incongruities ultimately undermine this book’s potentially transformative reinterpretation of Vico’s writings and psychology. Although Tateo says that “adopting the ‘principle of poesis’ in the study of the psyche leads to a shift in the focus, epistemology, and methodology of psychological sciences,” this volume has not yet completed that shift (214). To do so, it must ask more fundamental questions that go beyond humanism’s idealist conception of knowledge—indeed, beyond modernity’s epistemological perspective. Any reinterpretation of Vico’s New Science that retains the subjectivism that grounds all humanist epistemologies brings with it metaphysical assumptions that, since Plato, have been used to justify belief in an epistemic knowledge of reality—that is, the beliefs that reality is inherently intel- ligible, yielding universal and eternally true knowledge, the paradigm of which is mathematics, and that humans can know reality only insofar as they possess a rational subjectivity that is ontologically like reality, which is the claim of dualis- tic anthropology. Though Descartes’s critique undermined belief in the inherent rationality of reality and the ontological identity of subject and object, dualism was retained and science provided the methodological grounds for belief in the likeness of subject and object, which is the assumption that Vico’s master key and verum factum principle implicitly reject.

Since Vico called his work a “new science,” scholars engaging with that claim must consider what kind of new science a psychological science is when it is called “poetic.” Are imaginative universals that have been made with a poetic language “subjective” at all, or are they the result of a different meaning-making process, one that is embedded in the social and physical world? What is the dif- ference between an anthropology that supports traditional subjectivist assump- tions and one that supports the knowing of products of an imaginative linguistic social activity? Failure to raise such meta-level questions as these risks repeating the same misinterpretations that have kept the radical nature of Vico’s work from being appreciated.

Tateo suggests a new direction in saying that Vico provided a way of thinking that was anthropocentric and that identified our ability to know human nature because we share it and because it is the genesis of human making. Indeed, Vico raised an anthropological question that philosophy had never asked. Those who believe that the quest for knowledge is essential to humans accept the dualistic metaphysical assumptions of philosophical humanism that were formalized by Plato. Since Vico first published New Science, readers have displayed an inability to comprehend the embodied anthropology he developed against that dualism.[1] Such readers are the moderns whom Vico characterized as fixated on Descartes’s subjectivist justification of certain knowledge of natural science.

When Vico rejected Descartes’s turn to subjectivist anthropology, he rejected the possibility of epistemology at all as understood by humanism and raised a more significant anthropological question: what if what we call “knowledge” is limited to what humans make as wholly embodied beings—that is, the languages, gods, religions, customs, laws, institutions, sciences, artifactual things (cosi) of our ontologically real, meaningful historical world? What if making was due to the power of embodied poetic language, which was the very language that phi- losophers, in their conflict with rhetoricians and poets, devalued as opinion and fantasy? [2]

Vico posed these questions with his insight into what he called his “master key”: the “fathers” of the human world were embodied prehuman beings who, “by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets”; they were creators who spoke the poetic language of preconscious peoples.[3] That such primitive beings created human existence was an idea so strange that Vico claimed it “cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we [moderns] cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men.” [4] The radical nature of Vico’s verum factum principle cannot be appreciated unless we understand that the giganti were not human. Scholars traditionally consider Vico’s poets primitives or sinners, but this does not do justice to the strangeness of Vico’s master key or the twenty years it took him to understand it. The giganti were not only devoid of minds or the abil- ity to form abstractions; they were not even social beings in any existential sense. They existed solely as solitary beasts who possessed no relation to one another except instinctually. Without the capacity to feel a need for relations with other beings, they were incapable of human existence. Only with an originary potency that was ontologically creative of that existence could they be so.

That poets made meaning not with consciousness but with poetic language was a strange enough claim. Even stranger was Vico’s genetic principle that “the nature of institutions is nothing but their coming into being (nascimento) at cer- tain times and in certain guises,” and “things do not settle or endure out of their natural state.” [5] That principle condemns knowers, even of the third age, to remain embodied poets throughout human history, constructing what humans know with a language that is forever figural. Such knowers must give up the “conceit of scholars, who will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world,” or the notion that abstract ideas correspond to reality.[6] Given Vico’s embodied anthropology, the verum factum principle can no longer be considered epistemic. Elsewhere I have interpreted the unity of making and knowing as an ontological assertion that humans are makers of what they know, an alternative appropriate to Vico’s humanistic concern with knowing not the objective world of modern science but the historical world made by languages, literatures, religions, institu- tions, customs, and artifacts. These are the very cosi (things) that Descartes’s delimitation of knowing to the natural world made knowledge about obsolete.[7] Given that latter radical alternative, poetic knowing becomes the self-reflexive hermeneutic understanding that humans are the creators of what they know.

If the key to the anthropology of Vico’s embodied humanism lies in his claim that poetic beings create human existence ontologically, then we must go beyond the limits of Hellenism’s metaphysical frame to understand it. Other than the biblical world, which similarly identified creativity with originary language, the ancient world offered no way to conceive of a radical creative process that brought what did not exist into the world. In Ancient Wisdom, Vico raised ques- tions about divine causal agency that suggested a way to attribute creativity to humans.[8] Those questions culminated in the myth of origins that Vico developed in The New Science to support his insights about his master key.

Making his myth compatible with scripture, Vico distinguished between the offspring of Noah’s chosen and accursed sons. He identified the latter as the progenitors of the gentiles: fleeing into the forests, copulating with and living as animals, they lost language, their social world, the ability to think—their very human existence.[9] Those grossi bestioni created the human world, and they did so with imagination. In traditional humanism, the imagination is subjective, whereas those impoverished beings literally had no conceptual space. The ability to imagine occurred only when terror of the unknown forced them to make sense of what terrified them, and they could do so only with the physical skills of their bodies, the most rudimentary of which was perception.

According to Vico, the terror that animated these early humans’ creative imag- ination was first roused by the thunder that occurred when the earth dried after the flood. The sensations bombarding these beastly bodies—sounds of thunder, sight of stormy skies, terror shaking their bodies—were meaningless until they were brought together and forcibly projected onto the sky, leading these poets to see the image of “a great animated body.” [10] The guttural sound Pa forced from their lips named that image. As a metaphor, Pa had no literal meaning, but it called into existence a being in the sky who was angry with their behavior. With that poetic word, which named a metaphoric image, the poets created the human meaning that in turn transformed their animal behavior. Running to caves for protection, they created social practices—marriage, burial, language, their very social existence—and thus established the beginnings of humanity’s ontologi- cally real historical world.

Pa was the first certum made: imagination was not subjective but was instead comprised of solely contingent perceptions that were bought together into images of what did not exist before being reified with a name.[11] “Jove,” Vico claimed, “was born naturally in poetry as a divine character or imaginative universal.” [12] The linguistic creation of Jove was the first experience that was common to soli- tary beasts and elicited common responses, including flights to caves, abandon- ment of a solitary existence for a social one, and shared understandings of the need to do so in order to avoid that fearsome being. Pa had no epistemological significance, but daily experience now had meaning: behavior was governed by social practices that established bonds, in turn creating a sensus communis. Jove was a topos, a place of memory, not as a subjective fantasia but as an immanent part of the lived historical experience of social beings.

When the need to form linguistic generalizations that established laws arose, abstract language was created from the poetic, and with it emerged the silent dialogue that we call thinking.[13] Vico even related the emergence of “subjectiv- ity” to the ontological potency of bodily skills; indeed, after describing the events that elicited Pa, he argued that “Jove” was “the first human thought in the gentile world.” [14] Made by metaphors and images that were generated by bodily skills, language was not only imaginative but also immanent and temporal, a lived pro- cess of concrete making.

Vico was quite explicit about his analogy between divine and human ontologi- cal creativity. “Our Science,” he said, “create[s] for itself the world of nations” but does so “with a reality greater by just so much as the institutions having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces, and figures. And this very fact is an argument, O reader, that these proofs are of a kind divine and should give thee a divine pleasure, since in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.” [15] Vico was equally explicit about the differences between them, adding that philosophers and philologists should have gone back to the “senses and imaginations” of first fathers in order to study the origins of poetic wisdom.[16] He claimed that

the first men of gentile nations . . . created things according to their own ideas. But this cre- ation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with a marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons for who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called “poets,” which is Greek for “creators.” [17]

The poets created an artifactual reality that, like the natural world created with divine poiesis, was no less real for being so. Just as the embodied anthropology presupposed by verum factum deprives philosophy of epistemology’s subjective grounding, it also provides a conception of humans that is more appropriate for the humanist psychology that Tateo’s authors hope to achieve. The topos made from a sound generated by fear was inseparable from real social practices and physical labor producing the certa, and eventually the vera, of the concrete his- torical world.[18] Knowing can only be the self-referential truth identifying humans as ontological makers of their true things. That would seem to run counter to Vico’s insistence on the role of providence, but Vico’s providence was never a transcendent force but only a functional one, ensuring that choices made for private interests achieved social goals.

Philo Judaeus had given philosophic expression to the unity of the Hebraic god’s knowing and creating with the principle verum et factum convertuntur— that is, the notion that only the creator could know what he created, though he could grant knowledge to those acknowledging him as creator. Fortuitously, the verum factum principle had become commonplace by Vico’s writings. First for- mulated as an epistemological principle in Ancient Wisdom, it was only Vico’s insight into his master key that brought out the ontological significance of his claim that humans are genetically poets—that is, creators rather than subjective knowers.[19]

That knowledge of objects is limited to their makers reveals the skeptical aspect of Vico’s verum factum. [20] The made is known only by its maker because it is not inherently intelligible, and knowing is only the makers’ reflexive under- standing that they are makers. Vico’s delimitation of human knowing to what humans make strengthened his claim that humans could not know God’s creation; that humans can know their own creations is what, with Vico’s help, the authors of Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science claim for their new poetic humanistic psychology.

Although all of the essays in this volume are valuable additions to scholar- ship on Vico, few contribute specifically to an embodied poetic interpretation of Vico’s new science. The volume does not contain a discussion of language that adequately captures Vico’s claim of originary creativity, for example, and few of the contributions stress human agency. Moreover, most of the authors inter- pret Vico within modernity’s dualistic frame, as revealed by their pervasive use of subjectivist language. They have not yet realized how radical the shift from Cartesian humanism to Vico’s embodied anthropology is. Perhaps the starkest question they need to answer is, in what way is psychology possible without the metaphysical belief in a psyche?

Sven Hroar Klempe’s and Gordana Jovanovic’s contributions to this volume are responsible for placing Vico in particular histotheoretical contexts. Klempe situates Vico’s work in the history of psychology that emerged from metaphysics; meanwhile, Jovanovic traces Vico’s reception beginning in the eighteenth cen- tury. Both authors question whether Vico is an Enlightenment figure or a critic of the Enlightenment. Klempe distinguishes psychology from metaphysics by emphasizing its increasing concern with perception and sensation. He claims that the relation of sensation to intellect distinguishes divine language, a unity of mak- ing and knowing, from the ideality/generality of human language deriving from abstractions. Thus, there is a “mismatch and a tension . . . between our thinking of the world and the world as it appears to us” (54). “In our efforts to mitigate the tension and the gap between our abstract conceptions and the world,” he notes, “we try to unite those two extremes by means of thinking” (55): man “creates abstractions . . . and abstractions are given through language, and this is the real- ity man is able to grasp. This is the core of the verum factum principle” (60). He explains: “For human beings, truth is provided by language” (68).

Whereas Klempe discusses themes that are relevant to Vico’s turn to the role of sensation in language and thinking in creating knowledge and truth, he distin- guishes thinking, abstract language, and “inner life” from sensation and the body. It is “the spirit that represents the connection between the mind and the body,” Klempe says, though for Vico it is embodied poetic language, not thinking, that creates abstract language (56). For Klempe, Vico is a modernist not only because “we recognize the contours of a psychology by the role he gives the aspects of sensation and subjectivity, which form the basis for how language and meaning making are to be understood” (62), but also because he “is definitely . . . pointing forward by emphasizing the role of the human mind in the verum factum prin- ciple” (50). Vico, Klempe claims, “did not belong to the protestant church, but he adopted the focus on subjectivity” (67).

Jovanovic’s essay examines diverse interpretations of Vico from the eigh- teenth century. On the basis of Vico’s critique of reason and his emphasis on verum factum as epistemological, she explains, his readers consider him to be a modernist rather than an Enlightenment figure. Quoting Benedetto Croce, she explains: “with the new form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes” (93). Yet Croce “left out many important aspects of Vico’s thought,” Jovanovic notes: “Thus, it was necessary to overcome Croce’s idealist perspectivism in order to open new vistas for reading Vico” (82).

Jovanovic elaborates on the possibility of “open[ing] new vistas for reading Vico” by proposing that the “perspectives of doing and knowing are hermeneuti- cally united” and that “it is within this conceptual framework that Vico’s human- istic agenda is formulated” (79). She does not specify the nature of those herme- neutic relations but stresses the importance of language in shaping communities. She also emphasizes Vico’s privileging of topics over critique, so it is striking, given the volume’s emphasis on poiesis, that she does not mention the creativity of language, especially since poetic metaphors create a social world before they create the semiological views that emerge in the third age.

Despite her limited discussion of language, Jovanovic clearly understands the significance of its embodied nature and relation to human activity. For instance, she notes that “Vico’s anthropology is naturalistically founded, as it starts with capabilities of corporeal individuals, but it is not reductionist as it includes trans- formation and cultivation of corporeal capabilities and existing physical condi- tions, as well as symbolic products and social practice and institutions” (105).

Her strong emphasis on agency is also promising. Because of the importance of rhetoric, “Vico was a reflective theorist of human activity, but an activity of humans as social beings” rather than “of mechanical, subjectless, and communi- cationless processes” (95). She continues:

Given . . . the importance of . . . verum idem factum, and that not only as an epistemo- logical principle but as a principle constitutive of human history, . . . [it] is justified to see Vico as a modern thinker. . . . I would claim . . . this principle supersedes Vico’s critique of rationality on which most interpretations of Vico as an antimodern or counter- Enlightenment thinker rely. (97)

Jovanovic asserts strongly that Vico “should have been protected from pitfalls of subjectivism and idealism of the raising new epoch” (98, emphasis added). Though stressing the importance of the verum factum principle as “constitutive of human history,” Jovanovic does not appreciate the nature of that constitutive power and instead associates it with modernism’s Homo Faber (97). The activ- ity of the latter is, however, the technological application of knowledge that has been derived from science’s mastery of nature, the very knowledge that the verum factum principle prevents humans from possessing. Vico’s conception of human activity is empowered by the originary nature of poiesis that creates the human world.

Despite the richness of Jovanovic’s and Klempe’s contributions to this volume, and though they move away from identifying humans with the primacy of mental activity, it is striking that neither steps enough outside of the Cartesian frame to recognize the incompatibility between their insights and Cartesian modernism. Despite Klempe’s emphasis on the roles of sensation and language and Jovanovic’s verum factum as epistemological, she explains, his readers consider him to be a modernist rather than an Enlightenment figure. Quoting Benedetto Croce, she explains: “with the new form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes” (93). Yet Croce “left out many important aspects of Vico’s thought,” Jovanovic notes: “Thus, it was necessary to overcome Croce’s idealist perspectivism in order to open new vistas for reading Vico” (82).

The contributions to this volume that are most focused on the role of poetic language and sense-making in Vico’s anthropology are by Marcel Danesi, Augusto Ponzio, and John Shotter. Danesi’s contribution offers the most in-depth discussion of Vico’s philosophy out of all the pieces in the volume, yet Shotter, by stepping outside the tradition’s metaphysical frame, does the best job of transcending subjectivism and grasping Vico’s embodied creative humanism. Still, Danesi displays a strong understanding of Vico’s philosophy, saying: “The idea that cognition is an extension of bodily experience, a kind of abstracted sensoriality . . . is, as a matter of fact, the unifying principle that Vico utilized to tie together all the thematic strands that he interlaced throughout the NS [New Science]” (27). “For Vico,” Danesi explains,

the appearance of the metaphorical capacity on the evolutionary timetable of humanity made possible the passage from instinctual responses to the flux of events, where images literally floated around randomly in mental space, to a more abstract and organized form of thinking that helped to guide the mind’s primordial efforts to transform the world of sensorial inputs into cognitively usable models of experience. (44)According to Danesi, “the nature of the connections between things, universal and particular, is not available to discursive cognition. But they are neither merely fanciful nor principally subjective. They are real connections made in imaginative form” (34).

Despite this, Danesi ultimately encloses Vico’s poetic insights within modernity’s dualism and obscures Vico’s master key. Though emphasizing fantasia’s relation to sense and perception, Danesi accepts Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim that “language classifies, not ‘creates,’ experience” (15) and reduces language to “mind-space” (18). Danesi notes: “language and thought are interdependent features of human consciousness—that is, we use language to carry the main load of our everyday thinking. It is only when we need to create new thoughts that we must resort to our fantasia to help us out and start the concept-formation process anew” (15). Fantasia is a “mental faculty that generated consciousness, language, and, ultimately, culture.” “The most important feature of the poetic mind is that it seeks expression into models of the world in terms of metaphor and myth,” as Danesi explains: “From this ‘poetic’ state of mind the first human cultures took shape, developing the first institutions.” According to Danesi, “the fantasia can thus ‘create’ new realities totally within confines of mental space—hence the meaning of imagination as a creative faculty” (16).

Danesi identifies the ingegno as “the faculty that organizes poetic forms produced by the fantasia into stable structures.” Accordingly, “‘making sense’ is a product of ingegno as it imposes pattern onto the images that the fantasia creates in mind-space,” which explains how the first myths were made. Arguing that “agency is governed by ingenuity, not by some biological schema or imprint,” Danesi protects Vico from being reduced to neuroscience but keeps him in metaphysic’s “mind-space” (18). He associates Vico’s conception of language with Thomas Sebeok’s semiotics: “Language, for Sebeok, is an effective cognitive means for modeling the world. . . . ‘Speech,’ or articulated language, is a deriva- tive of this modeling capacity” (33). He argues that Vico can be studied in the context of semiotics since “his concept of metaphor as imprinting human experi- ence in the form of language… is the basis of modern cognitive linguistics” (24). Danesi explains: “The crucial lesson that cognitive science has come to learn is that the imagination and metaphor are the essence of mind” (29).

Even though he identifies the fantasia as “the fundamental feature of mind that allows us to transform and make bodily experience meaningful” (46), Danesi obscures that centrality by saying that “rhetorical figures, which abound in ancient fables, did not emerge to increase the imaginative enjoyment of myths” (44); they “make it possible for humans not only to represent immediate reality, but also to frame an indefinite number of possible worlds” (43). Yet Vico’s poetic language does not represent human reality; rather, it creates an artifactual one. Mind, though an artifact of the fantasia and the ingegno, is continually referred to by Danesi as a subjective agent of making that “operat[es] totally within mental space as it configures and creates models of world events” (18). Most strikingly, Danesi argues that metaphor is the “product of the fantasia—. . . a feature of the mind, not just of language” (19). “Metaphor is a ‘tool’ that the mind con- stantly enlists,” Danesi explains (35): “it expresses the reality in the mind of the speaker” (19). “The human mind is ‘programmed’ to think metaphorically most of the time,” which Danesi claims thus makes metaphor an object of conceptual thought (34).

Ultimately, Danesi’s appeal to cognitive science cannot explain the poetic capacity of the fantasia. Imaginative universals are not cognitive: Vico’s master key emphasizes randomness, the contingency of perceptions, and the insight that perceptions do not represent reality but are brought together to alleviate terror filling beastly bodies. And when brought together, it is language that fixes that image with a name. As noted above, Danesi draws on Sapir and Whorf’s claim that “language classifies, not ‘creates,’ experience.” Yet language produced by cognitive processes cannot explain the fantasia’s poetic ability since cognition does not include emotional interactions between bodily processes and the experi- ences in which they are embedded.

Ponzio similarly discusses Vico in the context of the emergence of semiotics and cognitive linguistics. Much in his explication of semiotics is relevant only to the rational minds of Vico’s third age. However, Ponzio concludes his contribu- tion by articulating a valuable reservation: when discussing Vico’s contribution “to the theoretical framework of current research in cognitive linguistics,” Ponzio asks whether or not “we may speak of a ‘Vichian linguistics,’ as Danesi would seem to be suggesting” (169). Acknowledging that there may be Vichian influ- ences on semiotics and other sign sciences, Ponzio expresses doubts: “Vico’s critique of Descartes is formulated in a context entirely different from Pierce’s” (170). Ponzio notes “that there is a great historical-contextual and motivational gap between Vichian inquiry . . . and current philosophical-linguistic research . . . to the extent that it cannot be classified as ‘Vichian linguistics’” (171). Ponzio’s doubts represent an effective critique of semiotic interpretations of Vico’s conception of language. Indeed, what is clear from Danesi’s and Ponzio’s essays is that focusing on semiotics and cognitive linguistics in an attempt to account for Vico’s poetic conception of language obscures more meaningful explorations of the embodied poetic understandings of language that are suggested by Vico’s anthropology.

Vico was writing before developments in biological science, but even if he had understood how necessary biological processes were to human existence, he would not have considered them adequate for creating human meaning. Identifying the body with neuroscientific activities has obscured a more funda-mental kind of embodied experience, one focused on the necessary interaction of bodily skills with the physical/social world and in turn emphasizing conditions that philosophers would consider sufficient—that is, experiences in the external world to which bodily skills respond not only to satisfy needs and utilities but also to produce imagistic language and social practices that create meaning, thus accounting for human agency. Those experiences in the external world, rather than either neuroscientific or cognitive activity, add sensory and emotional interaction between bodily and experiential processes, thus allowing for the poetic ability that Vico refers to as fantasia.

Shotter’s essay best captures the immediacy of that relation: the embodied, embedded, and emotional nature of making and knowing and its appropriateness for a poetic science of psychology. Shotter begins by discussing the issue that is central to Vico’s writing and cultural psychology: the meaning of human meaning. Meanings made in temporal developmental processes begin in mute times, bodily feelings, fearful responses to unknowns, bodily shaking, guttural sounds, and gestures before becoming images projected onto the sky, metaphoric language, and more complex linguistic and social activities that satisfy needs and utilities necessary for survival. Shotter characterizes those processes as “shared expressions, spontaneously occurring in shared circumstances, to which people spontaneously attribute a shared significance” (121). In elaborating on beginnings, Shotter provides what has been missing in existing Vichian scholarship: an experiential account of the transformative processes that lead from bodily feelings to creative linguistic and social activities. He omits purely necessary biological processes, since by themselves they do not capture interactions with the phenomena that stimulate them or the social activities to which they lead. He similarly omits linguistic theories that do not acknowledge bodily feelings, which are the immediate sources of metaphoric relations. For Shotter, only bodily feelings, external phenomena, and social responses to them—what he calls “shared significance[s]” in the external world—create poetic language and human existence.

Shotter elaborates on Vico’s account of the transition from bodily feelings to imagistic language that makes meaning from sensations like thunder: “the development of social processes is based, he claims, not upon anything preestablished either in people or in their surroundings, but in socially shared identities of feeling [they] themselves create in the flow of activity between them,” or what Shotter says Vico “calls ‘sensory topics,’ . . . because they give rise to ‘commonplaces,’ that is, to shared moments of common reference in a continuous flow of social activity” (124). A sensory topic leads to “an ‘imaginative universal,’ the image of a particular something, a real presence . . . , that is first expressed by everyone acting, bodily, in the same way in the same circumstance, but which is expressed later, metaphorically, in the fable of Jove” (133). Thus, according to Shotter, meanings are created “before the emergence of consciousness or awareness . . . occurs” (122). One implication of this is the fact that “language begins, not with people speaking, but with them listening, not with a performative speech act, but with a hermeneutical invention” (132). Shotter explains: “This suggests a quite different account of consciousness—of con-scientia, of witnessable knowing along with others—than that bequeathed to us currently from within our Cartesian heritage” (121-22). This is because “their meaning [that is, the meanings that emerge from socially shared identities of feeling] is in how bodily we are ‘moved’ to respond to them, in how precisely we are going to incorporate them into our yet-to-be-achieved activities” (122). Shotter makes clearer than others in this volume that what Vico means by “mind” is not only prior to rational content but other than subjective or cognitive processes.

Shotter, in explaining his indifference to biological conditions, says that Vico turned him from a “search for ideal realities (forms or shapes) ‘hidden behind appearance’” (120) that was bequeathed to social science by philosophy and psychology’s concern with “inner workings of . . . subjectivities.” Like Vico, Shotter desires a “direct focus on the unique concrete details of our living, bodily . . . participations . . . in the world around us” (142). He explains:

we have become concerned both with what goes on within the different “inner worlds of meaning” we create in our different meetings with the others and othernesses around us, along with paying more and more attention to our embedding within the ever present, larger background flow of spontaneously unfolding, reciprocally responsive inter-activity between us and our surroundings. It is as “participant parts” within this flow, considered as a dynamically developing complex whole, that we all have our being as members of a common culture, as members of a social group with a shared history of development between us. (142)

In focusing on “inter-activit[ies]” between bodily skills, external stimuli, and the linguistic and social activities to which they lead, Shotter reveals sensory and emotional responses to experiences and links biological conditions that neuro- scientists consider determinate to external physical linguistic and social activities that biologists ignore, enabling us to avoid the reductionisms that are inherent in focusing on biological, mental, or external sociolinguistic activities alone. With Vico’s understanding of wholly corporeal imagination, Shotter argues,

meanings are already present in people’s bodily activities long before awareness or con- sciousness of meaning emergences. For, although such bodily thought lacks an abstract or intellectual content, it does not lack a meaning. If nothing more its function is merely a figurative or metaphorical one: that of linking, or “carrying across” a shared feeling to a shared circumstance, thus to create a sense of “we,” of us all being in this together, a sense of solidarity. (134)

This “flow of social activity” similarly touches on what Vico means when he talks about providence. Rather than being “something external,” Shotter explains, providence is the “natural provision of the resources required for their own fur- ther evolution or transformation (or dissolution). . . . [P]eople construct in their own past activities an organized setting that makes provision for their current activities” (136). “What the ‘inner mechanisms’ might be which make such a realization possible are not Vico’s concern here,” Shotter says: “his concern is a poetic concern with what the ‘outer’ social conditions giving rise to a shared bodily experience in a shared circumstance might be like” (122).

Shotter enables us to move outside of traditional cultural frames. He credits his move to developments in psychology that turned the field away from tradi- tional scientific perspectives; he then found in Vico the emergent embodiment of humans, of which, he says, Vico himself may not have been aware. He claims that Vico must have acquired the ability to be “responsive at every moment to one’s changing circumstances . . . to a distinctive, imaginative sense of what it is like to experience and to make sense of events occurring” bodily (130). Thus, he claims, “the agent of inquiry” becomes prominent (119); or as Shotter says when he describes agency, humans develop a skill of “coming to feel ‘at home’ within a particular sphere of activity” (145). Shotter calls that skill “ontological,” for in knowing “how to be, say, a musician, painter, mathematician, company director, or regional developer, one must acquire certain sensibilities and attunements” and “come to know one’s ‘way about’ . . . inside the requisite, conversationally sustained ‘reality’ or ‘inner world’” (146).

This volume’s sharpest response to challenges from biology, and particularly what Tateo calls its “tendency to reduce psychological processes to the most basic events that can be explained through the biochemistry of the brain,” come in the form of Shotter’s focus on concrete details of embodied participation in the world (xviii). Biochemical events and evolutionary processes are necessary for human existence, but they cannot account for it without also addressing social, historical, and cultural activities. Those conditions, which are similarly necessary and, more importantly, sufficient, are the very activities that Vico highlighted and that have not been given sufficient weight by neuroscientists. Failure to appreci- ate the linguistic, social, and physical activities that do the actual creative labor of bodies leads to reductionism.

Whereas Shotter’s account of the way meaning inheres in bodily feelings and allows for “a sense of ‘we’” accounts for sensus communis, Ivana Markova’s essay provides context for that notion before and after Vico (134). The basis of Vico’s sensus communis is ingenium and imagination. “Diverse things,” accord- ing to Markova, “are brought together on the basis of immediate and momentary vision, that is, on the basis of the logic that enables creating images,” particularly imaginative universals that are rooted in common sense (179). Markova empha- sizes the relation of common sense to sensation and, because of the role of “needs or utilities,” to action (178). She stresses metaphoric language’s primary role in this creative process.

The final essay, which is by Carlos Cornejo, compares Vico and Nicholas of Cusa, whom Cornejo claims both adopted a “knowing by not-knowing” approach that Cusa calls “docta ignorantia” (197). Cornjeo claims that Vico’s fantasia continues that tendency of nonrational certainty, though he notes that Vico’s rejection of Cartesian rationalism and the constraints of the body “lies on a dif- fering anthropology.” According to Cornejo, “Vico’s proposal for ascribing more epistemic power to the human sciences than to natural sciences is based on a deep reconsideration of the nonrational capacities in the knowing process” (192). Vico’s relation to the medieval tradition “embodies both novelty and continuity” (196).

If the field of psychology hopes to use Vico’s new science to move from sci- entism toward a more embodied and culturally embedded psychology, it must accept his belief in a closer relationship between rhetoric’s conception of linguis- tic agency and philosophy, thus producing not epistemic knowledge but poetic meaning. Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science does not con- tain a conception of language that captures its connectedness to the body rather than to cognitive processes and to the hermeneutic ways it makes sense of and establishes relations with the experiential physical and social worlds. This is an originary power that creates meanings that are not given in nature. The volume’s authors also have not transcended the traditional belief in a dualism between body and some version of intentional cognitive agency. These inadequacies make it difficult to grasp a conception of human agency that interacts with and transforms the physical world, creating a concrete, real, and meaningful human world. Only Shotter appreciates the ontological importance of embodied skills, or the agency that he describes as shared happenings in the external world, “socially shared identities of feeling [beings] themselves create in the flow of activity between them,” “shared moments of common reference in a continuous flow of social activity” (124). This is the way human meanings emerge providentially before consciousness of meaning emerges. Shotter makes clear that what Vico referred to when he talked about the “mind” was something that not only existed prior to cognition but also contained dimensions that were not subjective processes. The developmental processes derived from the common social processes that Vico traced in the historical world do not constitute modernity’s progressive course. Rather, they constitute a cyclical course that produces a regularity that is more supportive of a humanistic (rather than a scientific) new poetic psychology.

It is my hope that the authors of this volume are open to nontraditional readings of Vico that are as strange to contemporary audiences as Vico’s poetic insights were to his original readers, who were embedded in Cartesianism. Only such a reading can free the imaginative and poetic nature of the New Science from mis- understandings that have plagued modern readers since the book’s publication.

Notes

  1. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, transl. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944), 128-32.
  2. Bergin and Fisch translate cose as “institution.” Elsewhere I translate cose as “thing” to cap- ture the concreteness of the world humans create, and I adopt that usage here. For more on this, see Sandra Rudnick Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science between Modern and Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 130n37.
  3. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, transl. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), para. 34.
  4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., para. 147, 134.
  5. Ibid., para. 59.
  6. Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism, 24-26.
  7. Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, transl. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 105-7.
  8. Vico, The New Science, para. 172, 192-95, 369, 377.
  9. Ibid., para. 377.
  10. The word certum (certain) refers to the first things created. 12. Ibid., para. 381.
  11. Ibid., para. 1040.
  12. Ibid., para. 447.
  13. Ibid., para. 349.
  14. Ibid., para. 375.
  15. Ibid., para. 376.
  16. Certa become vera (the true) for the knowers. 19. Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom, 45-47.
  17. When secularized, the principle’s status as epistemological or ontological depends on the divinity whose creativity humans appropriate. It either reproduces ideal rational truths or the volun- tarist power of an omnipotent deity. In the context of Cartesianism, the principle understood by the moderns has remained resolutely epistemological.

Sandra Rudnick Luft – San Francisco State University, Emerita.


TATEO, Luca (ed.). Giambattista Vico and the new Psychological Science. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2017. 242.p. Resenha de: LUFT, Sandra Rudnick. Vico’s new science and new poetic Psychological Science. History and Theory, v.60, n.1, p.163-176, mar. 2021. Acessar publicação original [IF].

 

 

 

History and collective memory in South Asia, 1200-2000 | Sumit Guha

Filosofia e Historia da Biologia 1 Reinhart Koselleck
Sumit Guha | Foto: UW |

SCOTT The common wind 1 Reinhart KoselleckHistorians always work in evolving political contexts that influence their knowl- edge and narratives. This cultural reality provides a framework for Sumit Guha’s imaginative analysis of how the collective memories that shape human societies are contingent and fragile because they are embedded within the changing insti- tutional systems of social and political life. In History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000, Guha analyzes the processes of remembering and forget- ting in South Asian cultures, but similar sociocultural patterns have also appeared in almost every other human society. Historical knowledge serves numerous public needs, including the need for governments and social elites to justify their power and the need for cultural communities to sustain shared collective identi- ties. Historians therefore have an essential public role for which they have often been supported in schools, religious orders, government libraries, and universi- ties, which Guha describes as the “cloistered” institutions that produce and teach historical knowledge (4). This link to institutions, however, makes historical knowledge vulnerable to changing political regimes and to popular upheavals in the social world that always surrounds the cloisters in which experts construct their historical narratives.

I. CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO SCHOLARLY HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

Although modern professional historians continue a long tradition of working in privileged cloisters, Guha argues that such experts have created only one of the cultural streams that carry historical knowledge across the generations of social life. The expertise of historical specialists has long been challenged or displaced by oral and popular histories that circulate informally in the public and private spheres of all human communities, creating alternative stories that have wide cultural influences and also affect the ideas of those who write history within even the best-supported institutional cloisters. Historical knowledge is thus inex- tricably connected to public life because it grows out of the collective identities and cultural memories that historical narratives both reflect and help to shape. The public interactions with cloistered historical knowledge, as Guha emphasizes with specific references to both India and the United States, have grown all the more visible in recent decades as diverse social groups have claimed their own historical knowledge and publicly derided the experts for writing false history. Professional historians are thus increasingly marginalized by the “knowledge” that emerges in the popular media or flows among the contemporary religious and political activists who wage transnational culture wars on websites and social media apps. Militant crowds in South Asia, Europe, and the US have been destroying monuments that represent discredited historical figures, but activists with radically diverging ideologies are also constructing new historical narra- tives that assert collective identities and political goals. These politically charged narratives have become part of wider cultural struggles to control historical memories, and they often challenge evidence-based historical accounts that were written in scholarly institutions. Guha wrote his book from a position within one of the cloistered institutions (the University of Texas) where professional experts have traditionally developed and evaluated valid historical knowledge. He therefore notes the context for his own historical project by explaining that recent public claims for the validity of nonexpert historical narratives “made me more keenly aware of how the academy exists only as part of a society” and how “public knowledge of the past” has long “been enfolded in political and economic systems” (x). Guha launches his narrative of South Asian historical knowledge with an explicit recognition that neither the political leaders nor social protest movements in our “post-truth” era are inclined to respect the carefully compiled, evidence- based research of professional historians (ix). Late twentieth-century academic historians such as Peter Novick described a declining faith in historical objectivity among scholars who worked in academic history departments, but the debates of that time were viewed mainly as internal philosophical arguments about the opposing epistemological perspectives of relativism and positivism.[1]

The cultural stakes of these arguments have now become part of a much broader political cul- ture because the cultural-political context has changed. Scientific experts have lost public influence as people outside of the traditional, knowledge-producing clois- ters have gained access to new media and communication networks. Professional historians, like other experts in both the natural sciences and the social sciences, now have to defend the value of evidence-based knowledge in a public sphere that often disdains the whole enterprise of careful documentary research. Guha’s account of collective memories and historical narratives in South Asia over the last eight centuries thus suggests that our (noncloistered) public culture may be returning to conceptions of historical knowledge that long shaped the use and abuse of history in earlier social eras. As Guha explains with persuasive examples, historical knowledge in premodern South Asia and Europe was viewed mainly as a tool to support the political claims of governing elites or to defend the sociocultural status of social groups whose identities were affirmed through semimythical narratives about past struggles and heroism. Human beings have always defined themselves, in part, by describing their historical antecedents, so historians inside and outside of institutional cloisters have provided the requisite collective memories in their written texts and oral histories. Yet Guha repeatedly notes the fragility of collective memories, which can quickly dissipate when social, political, and cultural regimes change or collapse. Most of the once-known information about past people and events has completely disappeared because the cloisters that produced or protected this knowledge were destroyed (for example, the religious communities that protected historical memories in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia), or because later governing powers had no use for historical nar- ratives that had justified the power of previous rulers, or simply because nobody believed that the activities of common people needed to be recorded in historical narratives.

Guha thus provides humbling reminders that historical knowledge is for- ever changing or vanishing amid the constant public upheavals that transform and demolish the work of historians as well as the past achievements of every other sociocultural community. Guha’s reflections on the contingencies of now- vanished historical knowledge may remind readers of the melancholy themes in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” (1818), which famously described a traveler’s encounter with the ruins of an ancient king’s shattered statue on a lonely sandscape: “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” No thing beside remains. Round the deca Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.[2]

One of Guha’s themes in this book conveys a similar story about the fragility of historical knowledge and memories, which means that “the preservation of a frac- tion of the immense world of human experience in the historical record depends on choices and resources, or else it perishes irretrievably” (116). Every genera- tion, in short, must reconstruct historical memories to prevent their otherwise inevitable decay and disappearance in later human cultures.

II. EUROPE ON THE PROVINCIAL FRONTIER OF GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

The fragility of historical knowledge is one example of how Guha views the entanglement of collective memory, political power, and public struggles for social status. History and Collective Memory in South Asia focuses mainly on the development and loss of historical memory in India, but there are also descriptions of similar memory-producing practices in premodern Europe. These comparative perspectives contribute to a historical decentering of European cultural and political institutions that draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential proposals for “provincializing Europe.” 3 Guha challenges Western narratives that portray a unique European historiographical pathway from the classical Greek works of Herodotus and Thucydides to the nineteenth-century, evidence-based archival methods of Leopold von Ranke. The uniqueness of early European historical writing mostly disappears in Guha’s comparative framework as he shows how medieval European memories and identities were constructed through genealogical research and chronological summaries that South Asian historians also developed during these same centuries. In both of these premodern cultural spheres, most historical narratives focused on local events or people; and the useful knowledge came from genealogists and court heralds who confirmed the esteemed lineage of people who held privileged social status and political power (or wanted to claim new power for themselves). Religious writers in both Europe and South Asia also offered popular narra- tives to explain why particular churches and religious shrines should be visited and why they should be supported with generous gifts. European historical writ- ing thus evolved as an unexceptional local example of the historical research that was also developing widely across Persia and India during this same era. Placed within this wider framework, European genealogists were (like their Indian coun- terparts) “bearers of socially vital histories . . . who kept records and sent out pursuivants across their jurisdictions to record and verify” (35).

Guha thus provides carefully researched examples of how historians can “pro- vincialize Europe” when they move beyond traditional Western assumptions abou European exceptionalism. At the same time, however, he adds to the expanding work in “global intellectual history” by using two important methods for analyzing the history of ideas in different cultures and for tracing transnational intellectual exchanges.[4]

Guha first describes cross-cultural similarities in the labor of heralds and genealogists who served sociopolitical elites in England, France, and Spain, but he also shows how historical workers provided the same services for social elites in India. The social contexts differed, but historians served similar premodern public needs in both cultures. The genealogical arguments for social status, political power, and property ownership were developed with an assiduous attention to past generations and with often-needed adjustments to complex social histories; this careful work everywhere provided essential historical justifications for noble and royal claims to power. After summarizing similar cultural practices that developed independently within Europe and South Asia, Guha uses a second methodology of global intel- lectual history to analyze how ideas about historical knowledge later moved across cultural boundaries and influenced people on both sides of the colonizer/ colonized social hierarchy. The themes in Guha’s narrative thus shift from a description of cultural similarities to a description of cross-cultural exchanges and the mediation of cultural differences. During the nineteenth century, British colonial officials and educators arrived in India with new ideas about how his- torical knowledge should be based on documentary evidence, so the institutions they developed for cross-cultural instruction (including schools and universities) became sites for new cultural translations of materials they encountered in India. British educators developed a tripartite narrative that portrayed Indian history as an evolution from eras of Hindu and Muslim rule into the era of Britain’s Christian Imperial rule, which British officials portrayed as superior to the earlier Mughal Empire. Equally important, a new English-educated, South Asian intelli- gentsia gradually adopted some of the new European methods and ideas for their own anticolonial purposes. Ideas and research methods traveled across cultural boundaries, but they also changed as Indian historians used them to pursue goals that differed from the purposes and expectations of British officials. The Indian scholar Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade (1864–1926), for example, worked in this hybrid sphere of cross-cultural exchanges during the colonial era, when he joined with other intellectuals in western India to develop a Marathi perspective on British imperialism. Rajwade believed that the “latest methods of source criticism would enable India to recapture its own history” (142), so his work made creative use of some European cultural practices that helped to advance the goals of an emerging Indian nationalism. According to Guha’s account of this hybrid cultural process, “Leopold von Ranke’s doctrines may have reached him [Rajwade] by indirect routes, but he was certain that their application would vindicate both Maratha and Indian nationalism. This was the atmosphere in which the early venture for a public and documented history was launched in the Marathi-speaking world” (143). These two methodological European exceptionalism. At the same time, however, he adds to the expanding work in “global intellectual history” by using two important methods for analyzing the history of ideas in different cultures and for tracing transnational intellectual exchanges.[5]

Guha first describes cross-cultural similarities in the labor of heralds and genealogists who served sociopolitical elites in England, France, and Spain, but he also shows how historical workers provided the same services for social elites in India. The social contexts differed, but historians served similar premodern public needs in both cultures. The genealogical arguments for social status, political power, and property ownership were developed with an assiduous attention to past generations and with often-needed adjustments to complex social histories; this careful work everywhere provided essential historical justifications for noble and royal claims to power. After summarizing similar cultural practices that developed independently within Europe and South Asia, Guha uses a second methodology of global intel- lectual history to analyze how ideas about historical knowledge later moved across cultural boundaries and influenced people on both sides of the colonizer/ colonized social hierarchy. The themes in Guha’s narrative thus shift from a description of cultural similarities to a description of cross-cultural exchanges and the mediation of cultural differences. During the nineteenth century, British colonial officials and educators arrived in India with new ideas about how his- torical knowledge should be based on documentary evidence, so the institutions they developed for cross-cultural instruction (including schools and universities) became sites for new cultural translations of materials they encountered in India. British educators developed a tripartite narrative that portrayed Indian history as an evolution from eras of Hindu and Muslim rule into the era of Britain’s Christian Imperial rule, which British officials portrayed as superior to the earlier Mughal Empire. Equally important, a new English-educated, South Asian intelli- gentsia gradually adopted some of the new European methods and ideas for their own anticolonial purposes. Ideas and research methods traveled across cultural boundaries, but they also changed as Indian historians used them to pursue goals that differed from the purposes and expectations of British officials. The Indian scholar Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade (1864–1926), for example, worked in this hybrid sphere of cross-cultural exchanges during the colonial era, when he joined with other intellectuals in western India to develop a Marathi perspective on British imperialism. Rajwade believed that the “latest methods of source criticism would enable India to recapture its own history” (142), so his work made creative use of some European cultural practices that helped to advance the goals of an emerging Indian nationalism. According to Guha’s account of this hybrid cultural process, “Leopold von Ranke’s doctrines may have reached him [Rajwade] by indirect routes, but he was certain that their application would vindicate both Maratha and Indian nationalism. This was the atmosphere in which the early venture for a public and documented history was launched in the Marathi-speaking world” (143). These two methodological realms. Oral traditions shaped the identities of local communities, asserted the significance of local religious shrines, or justified the social positions of local elites who continued to challenge the centralizing power of imperial states. All of these narratives could coexist with the historical narratives of large empires because “outside the early temple-cities and imperial capitals, . . . local and folk traditions propagated mutually contradictory but noncompetitive narratives of the past” (27). There was never just one historical narrative, and the local folk nar- ratives sometimes became more powerful and widely accepted than the official narratives that historical experts produced in the cloistered institutions of imperial capitals. In every historical period, diverging narratives claimed to provide the best accounts of recent or remote historical events.

Guha introduces early Indian historical writing by focusing on Muslim histo- rians whose Persian monotheism asserted the existence of a “universal history” that transcended the fragmented local histories of earlier South Asian states (45). Muslim historians believed that a single God oversaw every human activity because all actions took place in a “universal time” (51). This temporal perspec- tive suggested that every great or small event contributed to an overarching historical process, yet the conflicts over political power inevitably occurred in specific places and local settings that required historical attention. Genealogists and court historians thus wrote historical accounts to show the ancient lineage of newly arrived Persian rulers in the era of the Delhi Sultanate (which spanned the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries), and Persian-language narratives told official stories about heroic past achievements to justify the recent, regional expansion of Muslim power. Politicized historical narratives continued to appear during the later Mughal Empire, whose famous Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) bolstered his centralizing aspirations by supporting new historical narratives (in Persian) and building new monuments that stressed the importance of imperial unity. Other strands of social memory nevertheless flourished outside of the official court-centered narratives that Mughal emperors promoted. Both before and during Akbar’s reign, Guha notes, “many forms of collective memory coex- isted, with the new Persian political and military histories as simply an additional branch of memory” (61). Local memories were often associated with local reli- gious shrines, and long after the Mughal conquests extended into eastern India there were still Bengali legends, lineage stories, and Hindu religious centers that defied or ignored the court-supported Mughal histories. These unofficial narra- tives sustained Bengali cultural memories, though local Buddhist memories were often lost in the competing Muslim and Hindu histories of the era.

As Mughal power declined in the late seventeenth century, the rising Marathi state in western India became a new center of historical knowledge and collective memory. Guha explains that the “Marathi-speaking gentry had long written or dictated narrative histories” for the region, but their expanding political aspirations soon generated new “macronarratives” that helped to justify the political claims and collective identity of the ambitious Marathi (Hindu) regime (107). Historical writing therefore celebrated the achievements of a Marathi elite that governed a mostly Hindu population and eventually displaced the Mughal empire in north- central India, but the Marathi historians ignored the historical achievements of their Hindu predecessors in southern India (the Vijayanagara Empire). The eighteenth-century Marathi elite thus used a narrowly defined collective memory to create an “enmeshing of history and identity [that] was unique in South Asia at the time” (109). Other social groups continued to shape collective historical memories, however, through narratives that circulated outside the Marathi literati. Workers and servants, for example, spoke in court cases that Guha cites to show how nonelite people could provide important historical information about family events and property holdings. Challenging Gayatri Spivak’s famous claim that the voices of subaltern people could never be heard or recovered, Guha refers to late seventeenth-century court testimonies in Maharashtra to argue that lower class women and men in western India “could speak and were sometimes unique sourc- es of evidence” (99).[6]

Craftsmen, barbers, and even gardeners offered their per- spectives on past events or conflicts. Most were illiterate, yet “ordinary villagers . . . passed on key elements of local history from generation to generation” (100). Both the elite Marathi writers and subaltern speakers narrated local history in texts and court testimonies that Guha describes as more factual than the histori- cal narratives that appeared in other parts of India. The west Indian Hindu literati nevertheless resembled historians throughout South Asia in supporting their own government’s political interests and in mostly ignoring the history of previous rulers. Like other elite writers, they also faced the challenge of unofficial historical narratives that conveyed the perspectives of other social groups, including the obscure subalterns who testified (historically) in legal proceedings and family disputes. The struggle to consolidate political power was always linked to cul- tural struggles over the control of stories about the past.

III. HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE ERA OF IMPERIALISM AND POSTCOLONIAL TRANSITIONS

Historical writing in both the Marathi-speaking west and the Bengali-speaking east gradually changed after British colonial institutions became new centers of education and historical memory during the nineteenth century. Extending the cultural practices of their political predecessors, British imperialists introduced new historical narratives to increase their own prestige and stature. Guha shows that the power-enhancing uses of historical knowledge remained as prominent in the British colonial era as in the earlier periods of Indian history, but the British brought new European methods for source citations and historical writing. Their sources and narratives conveyed unexamined cultural assumptions about the superiority of Christian traditions, and they often portrayed British rule as a more enlightened imperial successor to the earlier Mughal Empire.

Although Guha explains how the British ascendancy decisively altered the political and cultural context for historical writing, he also argues that the Indian literati always found new ways to narrate their own history—in part by drawing on unofficial, popular histories that still circulated outside of British institutions.Indian writers increasingly accepted new standards of historical evidence, how- ever, which “tended to converge on demanding authentic contemporary sources” (118). The prestige of document-based historical narratives forced Indian histo- rians to recognize that “the power of Western narrative could not be denied, but chinks in it could be sought so as to turn it against the colonizer” (119). Counter- narratives thus challenged the official historical voice, which now spread a European, Christian message within and beyond the cloisters of British schools and universities. Guha gives particular attention to the hybrid historical work of western Indian writers such as the previously noted Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade and the documentary specialist Ganesh Hari Khare (1901–1985), both of whom wrote texts that differed from the colonial historical narratives and used more factual evidence than could be found in the genealogical stories and “historical romance” of Bengali historians such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894) (134). Despite Guha’s recognition of the cultural value in all kinds of historical narratives—popular oral histories, genealogies, religious stories, and even fictional works—he repeatedly affirms the superiority of historical research that uses verifiable documentary sources. Adhering to the modern research meth- ods of cloistered professional historians, Guha argues that the most reliable his- torical truths appeared in evidence-based narratives that explained what actually happened rather than what later generations wanted to believe could or should have happened.

The historical resistance to British colonialism did not end when South Asians established independent nations after 1947. As Guha notes in his discussion of postcolonial cultural transitions, historians in both Pakistan and India set to work on nation-building tasks that required coherent national histories and emphasized the kind of long-term continuities that nationalists typically find or invent in their own national cultures. The enduring influence of certain colonial-era British nar- ratives helped to shape new “ethno-nationalist” accounts of Hindu history that condemned Mughal rule and the oppressive power of Muslim outsiders (132). Colonial legacies also influenced some later postcolonial historians who sup- ported an “indigenist” rejection of the evidence-based historical knowledge that British historians had advocated in English-language universities (160). To be sure, British educators had often violated their academic standards for evidence- based historical writing as they promoted their own faith-based assertions about Christian miracles, the superiority of European cultures, and the flaws of Indian religious traditions. Guha notes with dismay, however, that the postcolonial rejection of imperial institutions and ideas evolved into a growing nationalist suspicion or rejection of carefully compiled, evidence-based historical narratives. Historians who searched for indigenous alternatives to British culture drifted away from rigorous research and celebrated ancient Vedic learning in mythic narratives that no longer cited historical evidence or documentary sources.

Guha’s concluding critique of postcolonial changes in South Asian cultures therefore returns to his introductory arguments as he condemns the dangers in “post-truth” societies that reject the foundational research of reliable historical knowledge. The cloisters of professional historical work, where evidence-based research methods established the criteria for accurate (though culturally inflected) knowledge, have been threatened or displaced by the political-cultural influence of a surging Hindu nationalism that resembles similar nationalist critiques of “fake history” and “false” academic work in the US. Political groups and their affiliated media systems in India and America have launched a similar “external assault on the community of professional historians” (x), thereby forcing historical experts to defend the truth of their knowledge in a transformed public sphere. Guha sees familiar historical patterns in these recent challenges to historical knowledge because carefully constructed historical narratives were often overwhelmed and rejected in the sociopolitical upheavals of past transitional eras. Each historical era is different, of course, but Guha suggests that cloistered historians may not recognize how the scapegoating of inconvenient or unpopular knowledge never disappears. “History departments in the few but comparatively well-funded Indian universities controlled by the central government,” Guha writes in a discussion of South Asian historians who lost influence after the 1970s, “were confident, indeed complacent, in their authority. . . . The narrow circle of specialists could still, in principle, resolve disputes by reference to sources and documents, as in the standard model. This gave its members an undue sense of their own grip on the past” (173).

This cultural moment has now passed, however, and the once-cloistered historians find themselves under attack from radical Hindu nationalists, Bollywood historical movies, and so-called identity histories that dismiss or misrepresent the complexities of historical evidence. This situation is by no means unprecedented, as Guha demonstrates in his careful analysis of how collective memories changed under the influence of different governing systems over the last eight centuries. Yet the recurring political struggle for control of historical knowledge seems to be gaining renewed force in a twenty-first-century context of far-reaching social media, website communications, and highly politicized group identities.

IV. HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN A “POST-TRUTH” WORLD

Guha’s careful examination of South Asian historical knowledge contributes valuable perspectives for wider discussions of how collective memories help to shape political cultures and the public sphere. He explains the significance of historical narratives and monuments that sustain collective identities, but he also stresses that popular memories and oral histories have always expanded or challenged the historical perspectives of cloistered experts and state-supported narratives. Guha therefore provides a broad overview to help his readers understand how contemporary critiques of evidence-based academic scholarship may resemble disruptions that have occurred whenever political regimes have been overthrown or new social-cultural-religious groups have come to power. Historical knowledge, as Guha demonstrates throughout his book, has always been fragile and vulnerable to public upheavals.

There are nevertheless limitations in Guha’s work that raise questions for further critical analysis. His insistence on the value of evidence-based research is relevant for historical studies in every society, even though the specific modern arguments for such research emerged in European universities and then gained global influence through other institutions that governments, imperial regimes, and private groups established in other places around the world. Guha notes this complex process of cross-cultural exchange, yet he does not discuss how technological transitions are creating new challenges for document-based historical research and also transforming how historians might study cross- cultural interactions. The new technological challenges began to emerge with the computer revolution of the 1990s, and they became even more pervasive as mobile telephones replaced printed texts and older computers for many twenty- first-century communications. Documents stored on obsolete floppy disks may already be almost as inaccessible as illegible stone tablets in an ancient cave. What happens to evidence-based historical memory when most communications take place in easily deleted telephone text messages or on social media apps that are constantly evolving with the technological innovations of companies that sell mobile telephones?

Guha concludes his book with a commendable insistence on the value of carefully researched historical work and a plea “that we continue to strive for an evidence-based mode of writing it” (178). The instant communications of social media meanwhile pose a double challenge to evidence-based historical writing because sources are disappearing almost instantly, and highly motivated political or religious groups are quickly spreading false historical narratives via internet technologies that previous cloistered historical experts never had to confront. Addressing the implications of these cultural changes would take History and Collective Memory beyond its chronological limits, but historians need to address such issues as they confront the growing public influence of false history, which Guha rightly condemns in his preface, introduction, and conclusion.

Contemporary technological challenges could be explored in future studies of new social media, but a different historical problem appears in Guha’s complaint that cloistered historians have helped to undermine their own evidence-based expertise by embracing postmodern critiques of objectivity. Ironically, as Guha points out in his preface, the influential Foucauldian argument that power cre- ates knowledge seems to have been embraced by powerful governing elites who generally reject the ideas and writing styles of postmodern theorists. One of the American architects of the Iraq invasion in 2003, for example, assured a journalist that American policymakers were powerful enough to define and thereby create political realities in a distant Middle Eastern society. “Postmodern thought,” Guha notes, “had thus been captured by its inveterate critics in the power elite” (ix). This concern about public actors who now adapt theoretical critiques of empirical knowledge to justify their own claims for reality-shaping narratives leads to one of Guha’s specific warnings about the current threats to historical knowledge. Although he provincializes European claims for unique historiographical traditions and methods, he also defends the Rankean belief in the documentary foundation of fact-based historical knowledge. Guha thus views the commitment to evidence-based knowledge as an essential cultural value that should never be dismissed as simply a Eurocentric ideology. Documentary evi- dence, as he correctly insists, provides valid criteria for historical truth in South Asia and in every other society that seeks to establish reliable knowledge about its own past. This commitment to evidence-based historical knowledge, however, leads Guha to an unexpected critique of historians who draw radical relativist implications from the argument that narrative choices shape the construction of all historical knowledge.

Guha’s work carefully examines the words and narrative structures that shape human uses of the past, yet he seems to pull back from his own analytical themes at the end of his book. “We have entered a post-truth world through many paths,” he notes: “One of those brought us here by arguing that all narratives were constructed, and consequently all are equally valid” (176). This is a puz- zling statement because Guha’s book actually shows why the second clause in this sentence is not correct. It is certainly true that all narratives are constructed, but Guha skillfully shows (and almost all historians would agree) that some nar- ratives are far more truthful than others because the best historical accounts are based on documentary evidence and other verifiable sources. Guha’s analysis of South Asian historians thus uses evidence-based criteria to explain why some constructed narratives are more valid than others. His concluding lament about a misguided academic acceptance of the postmodern emphasis on the shaping power of narratives seems to be refuted by the critical assessments of different textual constructions in his own impressive book.

My questions about the impact of changing technologies and the ongoing evaluation of truth claims in historical narratives suggest some of the key issues that Guha’s book encourages readers to continue exploring in our “post-truth” historical era. Although he develops an insightful account of the ways in which historical knowledge evolved in specific South Asian cultures, Guha also shows how this long-developing cultural history challenges traditional narratives about European exceptionalism, confirms the influence of cross-cultural exchanges, demonstrates the complex hybridity of colonial and postcolonial ideologies, and exemplifies the continual intersection of historical knowledge and public conflicts. Guha’s emphasis on the contingency of historical knowledge and the vulnerability of experts also reminds professional historians that sociopolitical forces affect the narratives they write as well as the economic resources that support their privileged positions. Historians thus remain vulnerable to the revo- lutionary upheavals they like to study from the safety of their cloistered positions.

Perhaps the current vulnerability of professional historians results partly from a gradual twentieth-century scholarly withdrawal from intellectual engagements with public life and public history. Given the pressing need for historical narra- tives in public life and in the cultural defense of collective identities, there will always be (nonexpert) groups who want to fill the public historical vacuum that exists when historians argue only among themselves. The historians’ long-term retreat to university cloisters has become increasingly problematic amid the recent populist upheavals around the world, but these unsettling events may now be forcing historians to become more aware of their connections to the public sphere. This awareness could grow in all national cultures as university-based historians struggle to maintain student enrollments and financial resources—and as activist groups constantly develop self-supporting historical narratives in the popular media that flourish outside academic cloisters.

Sumit Guha’s well-argued, well-researched account of collective memory in the longue durée of South Asian history thus helps historians understand the enduring connections between historical knowledge and the struggle for power in public cultures. Cloistered historical experts who find themselves increasingly besieged by twenty-first-century culture wars and polarizing political conflicts might turn to Guha’s narrative for transcultural perspectives on their current chal- lenges. They may also draw on his perceptive analysis of South Asian historical narratives to understand more clearly why they must engage with public cultures beyond their cloisters and defend the evidence-based historical knowledge that others will denounce, distort, or ignore.

Notes

  1. Guha refers to key themes in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
  2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 326. This reference reflects my own response to Guha’s themes; he does not mention Shelley or this poem in his book.
  3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Guha draws on Chakrabarty for his useful distinctions between “cloistered” and “public” history as well as his broader interest in displacing Europe from its “central, normative role in world history” (Guha 5).
  4. For a summary of notable research methods in this field, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 3-30.
  5. The key work for Guha is Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and transl. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
  6. Guha challenges the influential argument that appears, among other places, in Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 271-314.

Lloyd Kramer – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.


GUHA, Sumit. History and collective memory in South Asia, 1200-2000. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Pp. xiii, 240. Resenha de: KRAMER, Lloyd.The enduring public struggle to constructo, control, and challenge historical memories. History and Theory, v.60, n.1 p.150-162, mar. 2021. Acessar publicação original [IF].

This life: secular faith and spiritual freedom | Martin Hägglund

Filosofia e Historia da Biologia 3 Reinhart Koselleck
Martin Hägglung | Foto: SSE |

“You realize the sun doesn’t go down It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round” — The Flaming Lips, “Do You Realize??” [1]

 SCOTT The common wind 4 Reinhart Koselleck Why aren’t there life expectancy protests? I asked myself this question often while reading Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which begins with an atheistic confrontation with our mortality and builds toward a philosophical argument on behalf of democratic socialism. In some countries, and conspicuously in the United States, where I live, there are powerful correla- tions between wealth inequality and inequality of life expectancy. In some cases, the disparity in life expectancy stretches beyond a decade, equaling thousands of days of life. Writing in the New York Times in April 2020, David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez observed, “Rich and poor Americans used to have fairly similar lifespans. Now, however, Americans in the bottom fourth of the income distribu- tion die about 13 years younger on average than those in the top fourth.” [2] Why don’t we see organized political movements that target the link between wealth and longevity and protest the fact that without a strong system of socialized medicine, a healthy bank balance and secure employment are the only means to ensure not longevity—long life is never certain—but treatment for the injuries and diseases that cut life short? Why don’t we protest the fact that the wealthy tend, as a group, to live longer than the rest of us?

One plausible answer is that life expectancy simply lags after food and shelter, not to mention other basic necessities, in most people’s hierarchies of needs. But even when we are fed and housed, length of life might be too abstract a matter to motivate protests. We need a specific threat to our collective health if we are going to rise up. Exemplary threats might include a government failure to clean up environmental contaminants, the closure of a much-needed hospital, or the state cutting aid programs. Longevity itself often seems too inchoate a thing, and perhaps too personal a matter, to rally people around. I suspect that the idea of life expectancy protests just sounds silly. Still, I ask my questions: if this mortal life is so important, why do we not get more collectively animated about the measure of our years and advocate so that each of us can live as long as is healthfully possible? And why isn’t inequality of life expectancy across class differences an issue to march over? To be clear, these are my questions, not Hägglund’s. His interest in mortality is not exactly about lifespan; it is instead about the way our mortality gives us (in his view) a powerful reason to commit ourselves to worldly projects while abandoning religion’s promise of salvation. According to the reli- gious imagination, he argues, mortal life derives its dignity from its relationship with immortal life. Hägglund wants us to instead see the end of life as the only horizon against which our lives can mean anything at all—not despite the vulner- ability, interdependence, and finitude of our lives but because of them. Through a series of engagements with literary, philosophical, and political readings (among them Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Karl Marx and Martin Luther King Jr.), Hägglund argues that the value of mortality lies in its power to make us choose the specific commitments that will define our temporal lives. In par- ticular, we should commit ourselves to overcoming capitalism, which forces us to sell our time piecemeal and keeps us from achieving the truer democracy we might have if we could make decisions about our own time. Where Hägglund’s insistence on commitment seems strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger, his arguments that mortality ought to lead us to democratic socialism are strongly influenced by Hegel and Marx. This Life is a passionately argued skein woven out of two strands of originally European thought: Existenzphilosophie and Marxism. Hägglund does not detain himself with the matter of those strands’ past conflicts but charges ahead to demonstrate how they might cooperate in the liberation of our personal and collective time.

In this review essay, I want to simultaneously express empathy for Hägglund’s account of mortality, sympathy for his argument on behalf of democratic social- ism, and deep doubts about his presentation of religion as an effort to transcend this world, which I think is historically underinformed, perhaps on purpose. But first I want to note something curious about his idea of “secular faith.” In asking us to treat our mortality itself as the source of revelatory experiences that compel us to reorganize our lives, Hägglund may ask for too much. Certainly, reminders of one’s mortality are a constant feature of life. I write this review essay during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed about half a million people worldwide as of late June 2020. The news recalls to us each day our mortal fragility and our literal ability to kill one another by transmitting a lethal virus. Because so many COVID-19 carriers are nonsymptomatic, we may not even know we’re doing it. But the news is still full of reports of people taking stupid risks by socializing in public without wearing masks. Even during less fraught times, it seems surprising that human mortality doesn’t motivate us more than it does. Many people have difficulty getting much Du mußt dein Leben ändern out of everyday reminders of aging, like grey hairs, wrinkles, and the chorus of “Mother’s Little Helper” by The Rolling Stones (“What a drag it is getting old”).[3] This is why I became so intrigued by the idea of life expectancy protests, an entirely counterfactual notion that would involve people organizing collectively in hopes of living a little (or a lot) longer, thus making our mortality into a feature of our politics. Hägglund hopes that entirely secular accounts of mortality, such as the one he offers, can motivate us to make radical change. As Knox Peden points out in a review of This Life, in Hägglund’s view, the question underlying any normative determina- tion we make is, “what should I do with my time?” [4] Hägglund describes himself gazing out at the landscape of his ancestral home in northern Sweden, seagulls flapping against the horizon. “The horizon” is one of Hägglund’s terms for our mortality, too, and the visible horizon is readily recruited as a figure for a limit to life, encompassed by the human gaze in a way that the totality of an individual’s experiences cannot be (200). But horizons are tricky. I borrowed this essay’s epigraph from the song “Do You Realize??” by the band The Flaming Lips; the song is about mortality and the ineluctable passing of life. But as the song sug- gests, human perspectives have their limits. The horizon isn’t really the edge of the world. The sun doesn’t actually go down—“It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round.” The fact that life ends may occasionally fill us with a sense of urgency, but mortality can’t tell us what to do. The book opens with an image of the Hägglund family’s house on the Baltic sea: “The dramatic landscape—with its sweeping forests, ragged mountains, and tall cliff formations looming over the sea—is carved out by the descent of the ice from the last glacial period, twelve thousand years ago.” “The rocks under my feet are a reminder of the geological time in which we are but a speck,” Hägglund explains (3). Anyone who is familiar with Heidegger’s interest in landscape and place may feel a certain resonance. From there, Hägglund introduces his book’s core argument on behalf of “secular faith”: “To have secular faith,” he writes, “is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down” (5-6). Secular faith is juxtaposed against religious faith because, according to all religions, our finitude is a lack or imperfection that heaven or nirvana will eventually fix. The proper objects of secular faith are the kinds of things that would disappear without our effort: “the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity” (7). To put this a bit differently, the essence of secular faith is personal commitment to norms and activities that we define and embrace consciously because they serve our needs and purposes. One obvious example is a marriage bond, which is supported by the secular faith of those wedded; another is the current wave of support for democratic socialism in the US, which is mani- fest in the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America after the 2016 presiden- tial election. To our freedom to choose what we embrace through secular faith, Hägglund gives the label “spiritual freedom,” as opposed to the merely natural freedom of animals like seagulls. All we have is secular faith, spiritual freedom, and the time of our lives itself.

“Secular faith” may seem plausible enough as a model for personal commit- ment and a principle on which to lead a life of worldly purpose, but there is a twist: much depends on how much freedom we retain to do anything besides committing ourselves. If Hägglund’s secular faith means that we have a kind of obligation, in the face of our mortality, to the particular style of valuation and commitment that his secular faith implies, then we aren’t fully free at all. And here the tone of Hägglund’s book is worth mentioning. If given only one word to describe it, I would choose “insistent.” He seems to enjoin the reader to embrace his mode of valuation, but I couldn’t help but experience the constant injunctions to involvement, attachment, and engagement as limiting rather than enhancing my spiritual freedom. Drawing energy and interest from worldly pleasures and human connections, as I do, does not make me think that they can be the sum of my freedom. I can, for example, find value in the very ascetic and world-tran- scending projects Hägglund seems to abhor. Or I can find value in things without naming them as substantial commitments worthy of a lofty term like “secular faith.” If I enjoy listening to pop music or baking bread, the way that I enjoy them matters; I like to do them without thinking to myself, “life is too short for this, I ought to be reading Kant.” Not all of our preferences and desires have much to do with the motif of authentic commitment implied by “secular faith,” and it isn’t obvious that activities are better for us when authenticity motivates and organizes them. “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise,” W. H. Auden wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” but we prisoners do more than praise.[5] This is not our failure to commit but rather a sign of our greater emotional range. In a response to This Life, Robert Pippin noted that Hägglund seems to be asking for “a massive transformation of the emotional economy of the human soul.” [6] This is exactly right.

The book is in two parts. The first, which is titled “Secular Faith,” meditates on the implications of the idea of secular faith, in part through close studies of Augustine and Kierkegaard. The second, titled “Spiritual Freedom,” is more primarily concerned with our freedom in the world we share, and it contains an extended reading of Marx, focusing on the idea of human time as the source of all value, and the claim that this idea can set us free. The book concludes with a Hegelian reading of Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism as a form of “secular faith,” surprisingly (and for some, I imagine, offensively) against the grain of King’s self-presentation as a man of God whose activism—indeed, whose social- ism—was an extension of his ministry rather than in conflict with it. It is not so much religion itself that seems to trouble Hägglund as religion as the promise of otherworldly salvation, which he thinks distracts us from worldly engage- ment. In the midst of all this, he seems to argue that even religious faith must, in essence, be secular faith, essentially because we are temporal beings who are incapable of caring for anything (including redemption) that unfolds outside of time.[7] Hägglund’s readings of texts are nuanced and scholarly, and they include stirring meditations on the experience of time, a topic Hägglund has treated in previous works.[8] Especially notable is his examination of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which he establishes as a response both to Augustine’s Confessions and to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Hägglund’s meditations on the way the fragility of our lives seems to demand care are often quite moving; reading him, I was sometimes reminded of Emmanuel Levinas, a student of Heidegger who constructed an ethics out of the vulnerability of other people.

In the second half of the book, Hägglund—through a prolonged reading of Marx—argues that capitalism is the form of life in which we fail to understand what really matters, which is our time itself. A crisis of value results from this, and the idea of freedom “demands that we overcome the social form of wage labor” (237). However, socialism alone does not resolve the problem because merely changing the way the fruits of our labor are distributed among us cannot resolve that crisis of value; it is democratic socialism that allows us to state our values and work together to understand what norms we should collectively share. That’s the utopian hope beneath This Life. Socialism, for Hägglund, is the eman- cipation of our time, which capitalism forces us to sell off and which religion, as the opiate of the masses, once encouraged us to simply give away. Indeed, Hägglund’s argument could be understood as a logical extension of Marx’s view that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion. Fredric Jameson called Marxism “the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.”[9] Hägglund seems to hope that we can accomplish something similar, understanding mortality as the ultimate substrate of “Necessity.” Democratic socialism, Hägglund thinks, is the kindest and wisest answer to the brevity of life.

It is over the problem of secular versus religious faith that Hägglund often sacrifices nuance. Hägglund reduces all religious thought and experience to the devaluation of this world in preference of the next one. “To have religious faith,” he writes, “is to disown our secular faith in a fragile form of life” (52). As Peter E. Gordon has pointed out in his own review of This Life, even traditions that seem fixated on overcoming death through the salvation of the soul, such as Christianity, have more complicated histories than this suggests.[10] Christianity incorporates not only God’s incarnation in a mortal body but also the Divine experiencing finitude through the suffering of Christ, Jesus. “Even the eternal,” Gordon writes, “cannot remain unscathed.” The resulting attunement to mortal suffering has inspired many Christians to aid the poor and even to conceive of Christianity as having a special option for the poor. The Vatican contains many treasures, but Latin American liberation theologians like Gustavo Guittiérez have led a movement that speaks of wealth inequality as a systematic sin and calls for the faithful to push against that sin—and all this without rejecting the notion of salvation. Other examples abound in other traditions Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism all have their engaged, worldly activists. That Hägglund ignores this fea- ture of religion cannot be a sign that he is ignorant of it—liberation theology, for example, is quite well known—but perhaps it is simply inconvenient for his argu- ment. Or maybe Hägglund wants something that the history of religion seldom provides: a consistency between philosophical intention and worldly practice, a kind of total authenticity—something Heidegger also praised. For Hägglund, the deeds of religious charities are actions taken in bad faith, especially in light of do-gooders’ failure to abjure the world to come. Did I call Hägglund’s book “insistent”? Another word to describe it would be “devout.”

As Gordon also argues, Hägglund often appears to have elevated death to the status of an ens realissimum in the place of God. This, in turn, suggests that he still operates within the metaphysical structures (if not the content) established by Christianity, just as his tone and his key term “secular faith” suggest. This sheds light on the way the idea of “secular faith” seems to secularize an originally religious style of value-claim. I think this is a line of thought worth developing. Gordon seems to imply that Hägglund, for all his avowed atheism and material- ism, still has a tacit metaphysics, one in which there is still something transcen- dental (death, rather than God) that we grant dominion over our lives. This yields a rather flat picture of our moral universe and of our moral options. Since Hägglund writes as though his truth-claims simply outflank those of the religious, this sim- ply makes his truth-claims the inverse of the claims that religious orthodoxies use against unbelievers. This is secularism as dogmatism, so we are entitled to ask questions. I understand that, in Hägglund’s terms, it is because of death that our time seems to have value. But why should our eventual death be the measure of our actions in this life? Does this mean that those actions are not praiseworthy in and of themselves but are so only because they allow us to pursue our desired ends? I don’t think that Hägglund wants to open the door for a consequentialist morality, in which the value of our actions registers in their effects (he is too attached to the idea of the value of our will for this to be the case), but I found myself alert to the possibility. It’s odd when a tacit metaphysical argument opens the way to a form of consequentialism, but the history of philosophy has contained stranger things.

Hägglund seems to turn an is (our mortality) into something with the force of an ought. Or to reason through it more slowly, our mortality gives us a power- ful incentive to turn our various worldly desires, and especially what Hägglund suggests is our spiritual freedom to pursue them, into oughts. All normative determination, he tells us, should stem from our mortality, from our sense that life is too short. But again, mortality doesn’t tell us what’s right any more than it tells that to the seagulls. Perhaps more importantly, it isn’t clear that we’re at our best when dealing with the vertiginous prospect of our mortality; some clas- sic midlife recommitments are the equivalent of a flashy motorcycle or a poorly chosen affair. And sometimes invocations of mortality are a rhetorical cudgel. Life may be too short for bad coffee, but “life is too short for bad coffee” is still an advertising slogan.

What would life look like under Hägglund’s version of democratic social- ism? Although This Life doesn’t spell this out, it is clear that we would reorga- nize our means of production, and social reproduction, in ways that yield more freedom. It’s thus appropriate that late in the book Hägglund engages in a criti- cal reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Free Time.” [11] In this essay, Adorno observes that in the developed West, our free time has increased and seems likely to continue increasing; industrialization and technological change are the unnamed but implied lever of change. But Adorno finds free time on its own quite inadequate. He calls it “vacuous.” [12] For Adorno, real freedom isn’t just free time; it’s free time plus the material and social resources to pursue activi- ties that are ends in and of themselves rather than forms of consumer behavior. Real freedom isn’t defined by hobbies, however much I enjoy my bread baking or pop music listening (the former may, in fact, be what Adorno calls a “pseu- do-activity,” a parody of productive behavior).[13] Instead, it involves activities in which we have something personally at stake because in their fulfillment we recognize something of ourselves. At the end of his essay, Adorno claims to detect, in people’s pleasure at free-time entertainments, an element of disbelief or reservation. He hopes that this might be a sign of maturity (Mündigkeit) and the ability to eventually move from free time to freedom. As Pippin puts it, “What we need is not mere free time. In Hegelese that would be mere negative freedom within an insufficiently determinate institutional structure. Rather, we need socially significant and productive (and respected) work, loving rela- tionships and genuine mutuality.” [14] We need time, yes, but it takes more than time and free will to learn to recognize ourselves in our activities and through reciprocal relationships with our activity partners. Indeed, our finitude isn’t jus our mortality but our other personal limitations, and out of those limitations comes our need for other people. Taken to its fullest extension, an account of our interdependence might produce a picture of the human as simply not fully human outside of the polis, a current in philosophy that runs from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond.

Was I right, earlier in this essay, to say that there’s no such thing as a life expectancy protest? Yes and no. As I write this review, one particular political slogan is very much in circulation: “Black Lives Matter.” Although it’s true that people don’t organize politically in order to live longer or make equality of life expectancy their central issue, a concern for life and its fragility have stood behind the protests that have swept the US following the police killing of a Black man named George Floyd on 25 May 2020. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” is explicitly particularist rather than universalist (the universalist version is “All Lives Matter”) for good reason. Black Americans suffer disproportionately from violence, including at the hands of the police; because of the correlations between race and income distribution, they often have shorter life expectancies too. All this demands recognition. Solidarity in support of the struggles of Black Americans isn’t about the length of life, of course; Black Lives Matter isn’t a life expectancy protest. But it certainly involves protesting the unequal degree to which many Black Americans are exposed to violence, and violence is one way to make life itself an unevenly distributed good. This is one of the most remarkable waves of political protest this country has seen in support of Black lives, even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages. One must imagine Hägglund happy.

Notes

  1. The Flaming Lips, “Do You Realize??” by Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins, and Dave Fridmann, track 9 on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Warner Brothers, 2002.
  2. David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez, “America Will Struggle After Coronavirus,” New York Times, 10 April 2020.
  3. The Rolling Stones, “Mother’s Little Helper,” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, track 1 on Aftermath, Decca, 1966.
  4. Knox Peden, “Philosophy in Troublous Times,” Sydney Review of Books, 26 May 2020.
  5. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993), 2:2269.
  6. Robert Pippin and Martin Hägglund, “Limited Time: Robert Pippin and Martin Hägglund on This Life,” The Point, 22 May 2019.
  7. See Peden, “Philosophy in Troublous Times,”
  8. See, for instance, Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
  9. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 19.
  10. Peter E. Gordon, “Either This World or the Next,” The Nation, 23 September 2019.
  11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2001), 187-97.
  12. Ibid., 191.
  13. Ibid., 194.
  14. Pippin and Hägglund, “Limited Time.”

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft – Cambridge, Massachusetts.


HÄGGLUND, Martin. This life: secular faith and spiritual freedom. New York: Pantheon, 2019. 464.p. Resenhado por: WURGAFT, Benjamin Aldes. Seagulls! On MartinHägglund’s This life: secular faith and spiritual freedom. History and Theory, v.60, n. 1, p.177-184, mar. 2021. Acessar publicação original [IF].

The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past / Kalle Pihlainen

Copia de SCHEIDER Henrique Reinhart Koselleck
Kalle Pihlainen / Foto: ExpertiseInHistory /
In 2000 at the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo, I attended a session titled “The Historical Sublime,” which featured presentations by Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, and others. It was a marvelous and inspiring session attended by some seventy people. White and Ankersmit in particular stimulated the audience to ask questions and to comment on their essays. Referring to Kant’s concept of the sublime, White explained that the historical sublime is the unexpected moment in which one faces the unrepresentable and vast chaos of the past while at the same time feeling the limits of understanding. White’s statements reminded me of the bewilderment I once experienced while reading some of Franz Kafka’s stories. Indeed, one experiences the historical sublime when a previously familiar past is suddenly disrupted, revealing its complete strangeness. For White, encountering the strangeness and unknowability of the past can—in the words of Amy J. Elias—“only be comprehended through narrative but … can never be reduced to narrative, which is always shaped by rhetoric and ideology.”1 Preventing the historiographical habit of attempting to master a supposedly complete past requires an ambiguous way of historical writing and a refusal to provide closure.In The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, Kalle Pihlainen pays tribute to White’s work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. The book, however, only briefly discusses the historical sublime even though—at least in my view—this topic was very important to White. Throughout the book, Pihlainen addresses three core aspects of the term “history” and the historical discipline: the artefact, the practice, and the effects and consequences of that practice (xiv). The Work of History is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as Pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical construction—more particularly, “narrative constructivism” (xiii). At the same time, the book is “a meta‐critical enterprise,” as White states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains White’s work and its reception, including debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. Although narrative constructivism is a bit passé, Pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach in order to counteract some fundamental misconceptions about it that he believes have not been adequately recognized. In fact, the general aims of his book are to clarify the practical and ethical consequences of this radical theoretical shift in the historical discipline and to disentangle misconceptions about truth and meaning, particularly in the fact‐fiction debate.
The first misconception about narrative constructivism, according to Pihlainen, results from a superficial misreading of narrativism in the academic field of history that leads scholars to neglect constructivism’s and poststructuralism’s ethical impulses (xx). I wonder, though, if this is not an exaggerated view, especially given the many profound studies in historical research that include terms such as “invented” or “constructed” in their titles. Second, Pihlainen notices that the “excessive” focus on narrative, representation, and language (xv) has stimulated in the philosophy of history a longing for experience, presence, and direct access to the past, or attempts to bring “the real” back into discussions about the theory of history. He emphasizes that the constructivist debate is not “only” about language or reality (xv). He considers these views as caricatures of constructivist theory, which he prefers to call “narrative theory of history,” “narrative constructivism,” or just “constructivism” (xvi). A third concern is the idea of history as fiction, which many historians attribute to White and other experts in narrative theory of history and which Pihlainen describes as “equating history writing with literary fiction even on an epistemological level” (xviii). Pihlainen gives the example of how historian David Carr wrongly framed White as a “’discontinuity view’ theorist” (xviii), suggesting that White would have argued that there is no continuity between reality and narratives. The fundamental claim of constructivism, however, is that sense or meaning is a construction and that meaning is not “out there” to be discovered as some kind of truth (xxi). Moreover, attributing meaning is a process that always takes place in a wider discursive context. Pihlainen also stresses that, epistemologically, constructivism does not imply an antirealist position and that historians are bound to reference and make clear arguments in their writings. Equally important is the fact that constructivism reveals the ultimate political and ethical character of history writing. Historians’ awareness of history writing’s constructedness directs them to acknowledge the ethical‐political character of their history practice. This observation is crucial for facing the current challenges in the globalizing historical culture and corresponds with what Hans‐Georg Gadamer has called wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, or “historically effected consciousness”—a consciousness that is aware of both the historicity of the past and the historicity of the conceptual and interpretive framework of the subject.2 Historically effected consciousness includes a metahistorical dimension, or an awareness of the relativity and limitations of one’s own historicity.3The Work of History consists of seven chapters that are based on previously published and reworked essays, all of which were inspired by White’s work. The book starts with Pihlainen’s 2013 essay on narrative truth and ends with his 2006 essay on the confines of the form. Probably one of the reasons for this composition is that the first chapter, “Narrative Truth,” functions as a kind of umbrella text that discusses three key issues related to truth: realism and representation, falsification, and the position of the readers. Pihlainen considers narrative truth as the core of White’s constructivism. Taking this concept as his starting point, Pihlainen rejects ontological realism and the notion of a truth that is somehow unproblematically “out there.” A related misunderstanding of this notion, according to Pihlainen, is that narratives themselves are “real,” as if they exist independent of meaning‐construction (5). Following White, Pihlainen suggests that creating narratives, or representations as form and process, is a way of making sense of the world as well as an ongoing meaning‐making practice. Hence, he has hesitations about Ankersmit’s recent work on unmediated access to reality in terms of phenomenological experience. According to Pihlainen, Ankersmit assumes that the world reveals representational truth about itself; truth can be found in the world and even announces itself (5). For Ankersmit, however, the condition is such that the “self‐relevation of reality always needs to be ‘triggered’ by representation, … for if left to itself reality will remain under the veil hiding it from us.”4

Although narrative forms can be viewed as essential cognitive tools, Pihlainen claims it is a “curious mistake to extend this same centrality to historical narratives” because we cannot have direct historical experience (6). Thus, narrative as a sense‐making strategy does not hold for historical narratives. This statement remains a bit unelaborate and vague until later in the book, particularly in chapters 4 and 5, when it becomes clear that Pihlainen refers not to fictional creation but rather to the tension between truth and reference. Because of historians’ commitment to representing a past reality by means of referentiality, Pihlainen claims, “[h]istorical narratives—as narratives—are fundamentally disturbed” (63). So, there are two competing and conflicting positions in contemporary historiography: on the one hand, the writing of history always involves the use of a narrative form, transcending the level of separate propositions; on the other hand, the narrative is incompatible with epistemological evaluation. It is curious that at this point in his book Pihlainen does not refer to Paul Ricoeur. The making of historical narratives is a process of what Ricoeur has called “productive imagination,” or the configuration of scattered past events, persons, intentions, goals, and causes into a synthetic whole by means of emplotment.5 The overarching thesis of his three‐volume Time and Narrative is that the temporality of human experience unfolds by narrative. Moreover, Ricoeur also includes the role of the reader, which is an important element of Pihlainen’s book. Narrating history is a process of configuring time—that is, the shaping of temporal aspects that are prefigured in acting. The temporal configuration occurs in plots that give coherence to a diversity of individual events from the past.6 This configurable dimension, Ricoeur explains, makes the story intelligible and traceable. Yet for the audience to be able to follow a story, there has to be an endpoint from which the story can be seen as a whole, a kind of conclusion where expectation in the beginning finds its fulfillment.7 Following the narrative (such as through reading or hearing) implies a refiguration of temporal experiences. In the act of reading, the receiver plays with the narrative constraints and makes the plot work.

However it may be, the aforementioned tension that Pihlainen invokes is the often discussed and unresolved dilemma, as mentioned by Paul A. Roth, “between either epistemic standards inapplicable to histories or nonepistemic narrative theorizing.”8 Interestingly enough, Pihlainen does not dwell on this dilemma but rather, referring to White, suggests that the constructed nature of meaning makes all participants in “the work of history” ethically and politically involved (10). Historians, publishers, and readers have to take responsibility for the making, consequences, and reception of the narrative. There is no escape: meaning cannot be distilled from facts or reality “out there,” and historians cannot rely on some objective or acknowledged method. This ethical and political issue also touches the presence of history in people’s daily lives and the ways that interpretations of the past thrive outside of the academic field of history. Pihlainen explains that this public practice of history has nothing to do with the “presence” of the past or any mystical appeal of historical traces, nor does it have anything to do with experiences of—or direct contact with—the past (28).9 He obviously dislikes the presence paradigm, especially considering his statement that “the idea of the presence of ‘history’ does not seem to lead anywhere” (28). But it is possible, Pihlainen continues, that encounters with historical sources in the archives or experiences in popular genres (such as literature, theater, and film) might generate corrections on the level of factual statements, consequently undermining the coherence of a narrative. In that case, “the disruptive potential” defamiliarizes the “glossing and colonizing impact of narrativization.” The resulting increased fragmentation can stimulate “the disruption of narration and its control of meaning” (29).

In line with this argument, and inspired by Nancy Partner’s work, Pihlainen advocates in chapters 3 and 6 that historians should become more involved with the world and should pay serious attention to “popular appropriations of the past” (52).10 Indeed, academic historians increasingly acknowledge—although sometimes reluctantly—the importance of popular media and public memory in building representations of the past (99). Popular media and genres also include performative articulations like historical reenactments, museum exhibitions, street views with augmented reality, and interactive media.11 Telling examples of this are digital games about the Second World War, which have become a prominent method of cultural expression reaching millions of people all over the world. By allowing players to engage actively with the Second World War, this body of commercial digital entertainment games can significantly co‐configure how the history of this war is understood. These video games often create immersive experiences, but they can also stimulate informal historical learning.12 Digital games and augmented reality are current trends that can fundamentally change how we think and write about the past, hence even influencing historical scholarship.

In chapter 5, Pihlainen explicitly argues for historiography that avoids noncommittal attitudes toward the past (50). It is time, he urges, that historians and theorists find ways to become politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same (58). Based on this reasoning, the social responsibility of those involved in the work of history also applies to the current global protests of the Black Lives Matter movement and the fierce conflicts about the content and form of narratives and other representations of the history of slavery, colonialism, and racism. Just like engaged citizens, educators, and policy makers, academic historians cannot remain aloof in public debates. The current removal of statues that deliberately represent white supremacy is understandable, as is the call for rewriting history. But there is also the understandable fear of cleansing the past, of destroying culture and denying that “[a]ll societies are palimpsests.”13 What we need is an open conversation about the history of these representations so that opposing parties can learn. But we also need more.

No less crucial is avoiding the closure of a narrative and the judgments inevitably involved (96), including—in my view—counter‐narratives such as gender history, the history of black slavery, or colonial history. White particularly warned that the realist closure tends to domesticate and normalize the presentation of past events. The absence of closure reveals a narrative’s constructive and ideological nature, but it also provides room for reflection and discussion. That is why, Pihlainen explains, White can suggest that the goal of historical representation should be “to create perplexity in the face of the real” (11); it is also why, in his later works, he appreciated modernist and experimental representational forms that “refuse the kinds of closures attributed to more conventionalist realist as well as propagandic representations” (12). In the case of material representations, a closure—in the sense of a fixed representation—can be avoided by “counter‐monuments,” a term coined by James E. Young.14 Counter‐monuments represent a shift from the heroic, self‐aggrandizing figurative icons that were erected mainly in the nineteenth century to the antiheroic, often‐ironic, and self‐effacing postmodern conceptual installations of the late twentieth century. These often‐abstract monuments are dialogical and interactive by nature. Examples include the Holocaust monument in Berlin and the bronze sculpture by Zadkine in Rotterdam, which commemorates the bombing of the city on May 14, 1940. Counter‐monuments deal in various ways with “the unimaginable, the unspeakable and unrepresentable horror” of the Holocaust or other genocides.15 They can create feelings of perplexity, functioning as Kafka’s ax in literature, “for the frozen sea within us.”16

Pihlainen argues in chapter 5 that complexity creates a space where the text is not simply a given but becomes a space for communication in which readers and other participants are involved (91). For White, this complexity provides a way to make the past present—that is, to actualize it for readers. His view on the historical sublime, Pihlainen continues, “aimed at an experience that makes ‘real’ without imposing closure” and at the same time saves history from domestication (91). Although the demand for complexity and open‐ended representations seems incompatible with the historian’s responsibility and commitment, it is exactly the responsibility of historians, White emphasized, to resist the inclination to make a closure, particularly given all its implicated judgments. This responsibility includes the world around us, the impact of presenting ourselves as historians, and our interpretations and actions as readers (94). Yet Pihlainen is not happy with the way that White deals with the consequences of this complexity (108). These narratives and other representations, he suggests, risk becoming unreadable and unapproachable. Readers expect coherent and appealing historical narratives. Complex histories are more difficult to understand and might lack the emotional impact that audiences expect.

In his book, Pihlainen refutes the equation of “constructivism with unconstrained relativism” (66). He makes a strong and convincing argument for the political character of history writing from a constructivist point of view, and he encourages historians to challenge their readers to question received interpretations and to recognize historiography’s ideological elements (87). His emphasis on the role of readers and the communicative aspects of the work of history is most important. But Pihlainen’s constructivist perspective implies that historiography is not only political but also normative, often in relation to the political dimension. Contemporary discussions about the past do not just incite historians to put different historical narratives in perspective; they also require historians to distinguish which narratives are better than others, be it in terms of accuracy or morality. What, then, are the criteria for these choices? Which answers can constructivism provide to this question without resorting to realist ontologies or moral realism? Pihlainen does not pose such questions. I regret that the book sometimes reads too much like an exegesis of White’s work, in turn limiting Pihlainen’s voice a bit. Another disturbing element is that many of Pihlainen’s arguments are repeated. But it is beyond dispute that this book is worthwhile reading and that it truly encourages critical thinking about the “work of history.”

Notes

1. Amy J. Elias, “The Voices of Hayden White,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 22, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-voices-of-hayden-white/.

2. Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed., rev. ed. (1975; repr. London: Continuum, 2006), 336.

3. Maria Grever and Robbert‐Jan Adriaansen, “Historical Consciousness: The Enigma of Different Paradigms,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 51, no. 6 (2019), 814–830.

4. Frank Ankersmit, “Representation as a Cognitive Instrument,” History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 184.

5. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, transl. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), ix. See also Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 20–33.

6. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:65–68.

7. Ibid., 1:56. This actually implies the diachronic character of every narrated story.

8. See Paul A. Roth, “Back to the Future: Postnarrative Historiography and Analytic Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016), 271.

9. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1–29.

10. See Nancy Partner, “Historicity in an Age of Reality‐Fictions,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 21–39.

11. See Maria Grever and Karel van Nieuwenhuyse, “Popular Uses of Violent Pasts and Enhancing Historical Thinking,” in “Popular Uses of Violent Pasts in Educational Settings,” ed. Maria Grever and Karel van Nieuwenhuyse, special issue, Journal for the Study of Education and Development 43, no. 3 (2020, forthcoming).

12. See, for instance, Pieter van den Heede, “Experience the Second World War Like Never Before!’ Game Paratextuality between Transnational Branding and Informal Learning,” in eds. Grever and van Nieuwenhuyse, “Popular Uses of Violent Pasts,” special issue, Journal for the Study of Education and Development 43, no. 3 (2020, forthcoming).

13 Jonathan Lis, “Colston Row: It’s about Discussing History, Not Rewriting It,” Politics.co.uk, June 10, 2020, www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/06/10/colston-row-it-s-about-discussing-history-not-rewriting-it.

14. James E. Young, “The Counter‐Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992), 267–292. See also Andreas Huyssen, “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James E. Young (New York: Prestel, 1994), 9–18.

15. Huyssen, “Monument and Memory,” 16. On this subject, see also Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).

16. Ibid., 17.

Maria Grever


PIHLAINEN, Kalle. The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past. New York: Routledge, 2017. 144p. Resenha de: GREVER, Maria. History writing without closure. History and Theory. Middletown, v.59, n. 3, p.490-496, set. 2020. Acessar publicação original [IF].

Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness

Some might have expected Hans Ruin’s book to begin with a line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Burial of the Dead,” itself on loan from Dante: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Eliot’s reference to London Bridge—“Unreal City”—refers with metonymic obliquity to a children’s rhyme: “London Bridge is falling down, falling down.” This song includes the unmistakable conclusion, usually sung to general hilarity: “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”Other readers might rightly attend to the subtitle, Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness, and they will be richly rewarded. Ruin’s study offers a subtle yet by no means recondite project, broad and interdisciplinary in scope and more ethnographic than specifically hermeneutic in its concern, not unlike Thomas Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead.1 Ruin cites Laqueur, who, having told us about masturbation (before the internet stole his thunder), recounts, as Laqueur’s subtitle tells us, A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.

Laqueur covers the “work” of death, as Hannah Arendt defines “work” in The Human Condition, more oblique than the costly “work” of the undertaker as this redounds to the unsparing insights of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death,2 or the many resuscitations of such treatments including Susan Jacoby, Never Say Die.3 Such texts are serious treatments in contrast to more salacious treatments of death‐as‐entertainment, such as the American television series dedicated to serial murder, featuring the manufacture of corpses on a seemingly industrial scale, which the coroner‐hero of Dexter (2006–2013) manages to produce by night and process by day. Like the friendly vampire and fairy series True Blood (2006–2014), the Florida‐based Dexter is a humanizing take on dark themes, echoing the more northerly funeral home sitcom, Six Feet Under (2001–2005).

In the genre of popular reading, there is also anatomy and medical science in F. Gonzalez‐Crussi’s The Day of the Dead4 or else in Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter,5 a medical insider’s take on the matter of dying. This last is not altogether unlike Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis,6 as Nuland argues that, although modern medicine can hardly stave off death, it can prolong its eventuation, fixing it to the day and the hour (useful for harvesting organs). Nuland’s book inspired a genre of “truth to death” reports from the hospital front, including Seamus O’Mahony’s recent update, The Way We Die Now.7

Ruin tells us about bones—their excavation, curation, memorialization as cemeteries and in museums, archaeological gravesites, “roots” of historical consciousness—in a chapter dedicated to “Ossuary Hermeneutics.” Alphonso Lingis’s musings on archaeology8 differ from Ruin’s “The Necropolitical Sites of Archaeology.” Yet there is a convergence, and Lingis invokes the same “modern academic discipline of archaeology” (115) Ruin engages as he reads practical illustrations from archaeology together with physical anthropology. For the current reader, originally trained in the life sciences, such tacks involve analogies with quite contemporaneous living beings, an always unremarked detail that engenders conceptual solecism—as in the case of chimpanzees who are not antecedent beings from the past but quite as evolved as any other being on this earth—in Ruin’s discussion of the Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa (122f.).

The interlocutor for Ruin in his discussion is Lewis Binford’s “New Archaeology” (128f.).9 The “new” includes the New World, the Americas, North and South, and to be sure the aggressions against American Indians with their own cast of archaeological claimants. Thus Ruin cites the 1906 Antiquities Act that transformed “the skeletons of Native Americans … into ‘historical artifacts’” (137). A parallel might have been made with John Gray’s discussion of Tasmanian cultural appropriation and genocide in his Straw Dogs,10 but Ruin foregrounds the 1989 World Archaeological Congress in South Dakota on “Archaeological Ethics and the Treatment of the Dead” (138).

From “unreal city” to the uncanny

“Studious and charitable, tender as I am for the dead of the world … thus I roamed, from age to age, always young and never tired, for thousands of years.”

— Michelet, in Certeau11

Ruin’s Being with the Dead is uncanny and cannot but be so. This is not simply a result of the theme, nor of Ruin’s beautiful writing style. As ethnography, it is directed to others as to ourselves, crossing several disciplines. Not all ethnography is like this, and most ethnography, as Bruno Latour has told us,12 is not: we Western scholars tend either to count ourselves out of the picture by attending to obscure folk group practices (first communion rites, say) or by retracing collective myths of past consciousness to do our self‐ethnography.

Ruin’s book is more than a phenomenology of death/the dead. It has seven chapters, an introduction, and a coda. The first chapter, “Thinking after Life: Historicity and Having‐Been,” is the most Heideggerian, and perhaps, given that Ruin has already published a great deal on Heidegger, this is a light chapter. At the same time, this lightness softens Ruin’s focus, shared as it is with most of today’s approaches to phenomenological questions, as the phenomenologist of the chapter is Hegel, fitting Ruin’s discussion of Heidegger on Antigone and Hölderlin.

Hegel continues as spirit guide in the next chapter, “Thanatologies: On the Social Meaning of Burial.” In addition to Garland and Ariès—and Laqueur—Ruin takes note of the sociolinguist Robert Hertz, who died in the First World War—yet another London Bridge event—along with many others. Ruin is particularly interested in the sociology of burial, of double burial, and the strange claims of ritual, which are—and this is Ruin’s overarching theme—the presence of and encounter with community. Hertz’s focus is the well‐studied Dayaks of Borneo, who, far more than most European communities, “live” with the dead, exhuming them, washing them, dressing them, sitting with them at table, all part of a complex ancestor cult involving the dead within the fabric of everyday life, and then, when “only the bones remain,” reburying them.13

Ruin draws upon Hertz’s research for comparisons and distinctions between the related practices of the followers of the Zend Avesta, as well as other traditions, including “Australian tribes” and Choctaw and Huron American Indians. The chapter includes a discussion of Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim and the reflection, important for the book, drawn from Mauss’s necrology for Durkheim: “Together with them beyond death.” This Ruin interprets as celebrating “the possibility of collective life over and beyond individual loss and a rebirth on the barren soil of death” (88).

A focus on ancestors leads in the next chapter to the primitive engagement with burial: “Ancestrality: Ghosts, Forefathers, and Other Dead.” Here, too, an Anglophone Hegel appears as spirit guide, permitting Ruin to catalogue the Western contribution of the triad array of ghosts, souls, and spirits (Gespenst, Seele, Geister) to the Hegelian language of Geist. In the grand scheme that is Hegel’s own imaginary, the “dark continent,” Africa, is the ghost world. In this locus, although Ruin does not cite this, Nietzsche’s quip, Ohne Hegel, kein Darwin, might have rewarded further reflection as would a parallel with Günther Anders and Theodor Adorno on race and the technologies of genocide.14

It is the putative or presumed primitive character of Africa for Hegel that enables Ruin’s reading of Hegel’s account of forbearance, whereby he can quote Hegel as suggesting that slavery should be gently eased away from Africa; Africans are not yet “evolved” enough for abrupt liberation.15 As Ruin goes on to say: “From the viewpoint of our question it is significant to note that Hegel’s depiction of Africa as the ‘dark’ and unconscious continent specifically involves his understanding of ancestor worship” (105). To this, Robert Bernasconi’s reminder of what is occluded here is recommended, elegantly argued in his “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti.”16 This is the continually suppressed oppression inherent in Western philosophy, not simply of the other qua other, but via slavery. All this advertence is difficult; think of what remains unthought despite reflections on the logic of misogyny, as recently explored in Kate Manne’s Down Girl, itself revisiting without engaging Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. There is what we tend not to quite notice in the space, the wake, the aftermath of what we do notice.

 

Blood for the ghosts

A truly “historical” rendition would be ghostly speech before ghosts.—Nietzsche17

Ruin’s book approaches the past as other and as locus, as in his title: Being with the Dead. Reading Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History, itself with an homage to Jules Michelet, Ruin cites Certeau’s observation that “the other is the phantasm of historiography, the object that it seeks, honors and buries” (161). Ruin reads this in terms of his own crucial recollection of the Homeric accounting of the rites of sacrifice in relation to the dead. The reference draws on a metaphor—blood—key for nineteenth‐century classical philology. Thus Ruin cites Erwin Rohde, author of two volumes on the soul in antiquity, Psyche, who characterized the ancient Greek dead as “being in need of sacrifices and rites” (see 111).

This is to the point of the crucial text Ruin invokes relating the rites performed by Odysseus in book XI of the Odyssey. Here we read Ruin himself glossing Homer:

On the spot indicated by Circe he digs a hole in the ground and performs the ordained sacrificial rites, the culmination of which is pouring of blood from slaughtered lambs into a pit. It is the blood that calls forth the demons, ghosts, or souls, the psychai of the dead, who when they drink it are permitted to leave their shadowy existence for a moment to see, sense, and speak to the living. As the souls of the dead, attracted by the blood, come forth in great numbers, Odysseus is first gripped by fear, and he draws his sword to keep them away from the pit and to hear them one by one … (224).

For his part, Ruin tracks the “Homer question” beginning with Erich Bethe’s 1935 study.18 Yet Ruin does not discuss the history of this question any more than he mentions the classicist Friedrich Nietzsche in this specific context, quite as if Nietzsche had never written on Homer, although Ruin does note Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian along with a brief discussion of Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche. Ruin thus overlooks both Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture in Basel (1869) on the relation between the Homer “question” and philology as such and the question of the role of the dead in Nietzsche. However, death is prominent in Nietzsche’s work beginning with The Birth of Tragedy and, most popularly, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, starting with the death of god, the sudden fall of a tightrope dancer during Zarathustra’s speech in the marketplace, including the performer’s last words to Zarathustra, and Zarathustra carrying the resultant corpse long enough to “bury” him—good Parsi style, good Greek style—in the hollow of a tree, just to limit ourselves to Zarathustra’s “Prelude.”

Excluding Nietzsche from his original disciplinary field, Ruin does what others do. But in his first Basel lecture, Nietzsche sought to raise the question of the person of Homer, historiographically, historiologically, indeed: hermeneutically. This is the locus classicus, as Nietzsche concludes with the text Ruin glosses above, quoting Homer’s Nykia.19 Apostrophizing his own colleagues, Nietzsche parallels the “Homer question” with the fortunes of classical philology:

You indeed honour the immortal masterpieces of the Hellenic Spirit in word and image, and imagine yourselves that much richer and happier than the generations that lacked them: now, do not forget that this entire magical world once lay buried, overlain by mountain‐high prejudices, do not forget the blood and sweat and the most arduous intellectual work of countless devotees of our science were necessary to permit that world to rise up from its oblivion [Versenkung].20

Apart from the sunken past and risen voices, the blood reference may be tracked through Nietzsche, as Zarathustra tells us in a section entitled “Vom Lesen und Schreiben”: “Of all that is written, I only love what one has written with his own blood. Write with blood: and you will learn that blood is spirit.”21

As Ruin reminds us, we are told the tale of Odysseus’s “journey to the underworld,” to “the land of the dead” (222–223). Conversation with the dead is the sign of the hero and the mark of the seer in Homer. To bring the dead to life is the divine sign of a healer, characteristic of the philosopher in antiquity, an achievement associated with both Pythagoras and Empedocles. With respect to Empedocles, Diogenes Laërtius attributes a host of powers: controlling the winds and the rains, citing Empedocles’s promise to his acolytes: “And you shall bring [back] from Hades the strength of a dead man.”22

Such is an earmark of Orphism. Metonymically, too, quite as Saint Severus of Naples was said to have had the power to recall a man from death, J. K. Rowling seems to echo Empedocles in Professor Severus Snape’s promise: “I can tell you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even put a stopper in death.”23

The task of what Michelet names “resurrectionism” (160) is accomplished, so we read Homer, if (and only so long as) there is blood. This is the promise of the mystery tradition and philosophy and classical philology, to cite the title of Hugh Lloyd‐Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.24

As Nietzsche’s closing allusion in his first lecture as a professor of classics emphasizes, this is a metaphor for historical hermeneutics. In the same spirit, William J. Richardson prefaces his Heidegger book, “encouraging” his readers by pointing to his own struggles, “blood on the rocks,”25 as inspiration.

Homer’s Odysseus makes an animal sacrifice (some say lambs, though Nietzsche speaks of rams), pouring out blood so that the souls of the dead may be able to speak, with tragic—and fading—results. The dissonance of this constellation, part of the ancient Greek rites specified for such a sacrifice, inheres in its terrible logical coherence. The Greek death cult, the mystery rites, work as they do because the Greeks presupposed no more than an afterlife of shadows: lacking spirit or consciousness unless primed with blood or otherwise prepared for.

In what follows, I supplement the engaging discussions offered in Ruin’s book on “being with the dead” by adding a reference to death and to blood in Nietzsche, who frequently presses such references. Thus Nietzsche begins his 1878 Human, All Too Human, with a reference to death in the section entitled “Von den ersten und letzten Dingen”—On First and Last Things—as well as in the second volume, Assorted Opinions and Maxims (1879), before he turns to converse with his shadow in The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), where he emphasizes the reanimating importance of blood sacrifices, as “active endeavours to help them to come repeatedly to life as it were.”26

The language of ghosts and shadows refers to the underworld and death, adumbrated by the title of Nietzsche’s aphorism §408, and recently translated as “The Trip to Hades,”27 but better rendered by R. J. Hollingdale as “Descent into Hades.”28

This Hadesfahrt, or Journey to Hell, echoes Lucian’s own Downward Journey, or Journey into Port, Κατάπλους ἢ Τύϱαννος (in German as Die Überfahrt oder der Tyrann), a dialogue set at the moment of death. This is the downward‐going cross‐over, or passage from death to the afterlife, with Hermes in attendance, a parodic illustration of the ancient cliché that is the Greek Stoic ideal of the best way to die (as we may recall Epictetus encouraging that one be quite ready to drop everything). Here, the cliché personified by the laughing shoemaker, Mycillus, who does come running, embarrassingly over‐eager to depart. Nietzsche borrows the image of his Übermensch, the Overhuman, from this dialogue.29

Lucian’s dialogue was also, as we know, David Hume’s death‐bed reading,30 and Nietzsche’s final section of his second volume of Human, All Too Human, concludes with a reflection on authorly life “after death.”31 We also encounter a series of death‐bound sections in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: §278 On the Thought of Death (significant for Susan Sontag32), in addition to §281 Knowing How to End, §285 Excelsior, §315 On the Last Hour, and finally §340 The Dying Socrates and §341 The Greatest Heavy‐Weight.

In Human, All Too Human, §408, Nietzsche offers us an et in Arcadia variation: “I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and will often be there again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able to talk with the dead but have not spared my own blood as well. There have been four pairs who did not refuse themselves to me, the sacrificer.”33 The rebuke of the historian implies that, by contrast with scholarly engagement with “those who seem so alive,” the living seem lifeless in their turn. Thus Nietzsche highlights “paying” with blood, for the sake of the kind of knowledge and style of writing to be learned by heart.

We noted above that the bloodlessness of the dead has, for the Greeks, a logical corollary. The insight yielded a cult of note‐taking as guide for what to do when your memory, your mind, your awareness of self no longer serves. By necropolitical contrast, Ruin’s concern is not with individual life, despite Heidegger and despite the Greeks themselves, but is instead and as Ruin explains, a concern with Alfred Schütz’s sociologically minded “world of predecessors,” providing the dead, historiologically speaking, with “a space in history” (106), for the sake of “an expanded theory of history as a space of life with the dead, as a life with those having‐been” (107). The “new” ethnography—“postprimitivistic” as Ruin writes, paralleling this with “posthumanism and the new materialism”—can now ascribe “‘agency’ to non‐living artifacts as well as to the dead” (108). The result is, as Ruin points out, not a little problematic, calling for care and sensitivity.

The fragmentary hints of the life of birds as one may read in the Derveni Papyrus may be less salient here than the broader Orphic tradition as such. In the same way, the Petelia golden tablets preserve a script to guide the mindless soul away from immediate disaster. If thirsty, the soul is told to avoid the first spring, where everyone else may be seen drinking their fill—a caution one can fear might never be read: will the soul remember to read or still be able to read?34 The souls of the dead given voice in the words of ghosts cannot be understood. In the Iliad, Homer relates the wailing ululation of Patroclus, an incoherent lament that does more to move Achilles than rational discourse. This is the destiny of heroes like Odysseus as Ruin glosses the rites that enable his encounter, his being‐with the thus‐summoned or risen dead. Things are different for the wise—note the difference from Oedipus, whose death and its sacrality Nietzsche details in his first book. Crucially, philosophy begins with Orphism. Thus for those mindful enough, philosophical enough to have practiced these Orphic rites, the next words are key: “I am parched with thirst and am dying; but quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink.”35

The focus here is Vergegenwärtigung, re‐presentation, reconstitution. This effects the work of sacrifice in Homer’s uncanny sense. Nietzsche tells us that if we mean to hear from the silent ghosts, we must give them blood. Odysseus, mantic as he was, sacrificed animal blood. By contrast, Empedocles cautions that this, given the unity of all with all, leads to what he calls “dining on oneself,” “Sichselbstverspeisen.”36 The blood we must give, Nietzsche says, is our own.

Zombie scholarship: on being “scientifically dead” – between usener and Nietzsche

… it is only if we bestow upon them our soul that they can continue to live: it is only our blood that constrains them to speak to us.—Nietzsche37

What I call “zombie scholarship” is commonplace. Books are written, but they are not read. A scholar stakes out a pathbreaking insight and others simply ignore it; they do not read it, or if they do, they are careful to avoid mentioning it. Thus I began this essay with a reflection on the sheer abundance of books on death and dying and on filmic allusions to the undead, or vampires, or to catastrophic futures, haunted by zombies. These are not necessarily the ghosts summoned by blood sacrifice, as Ruin writes, but films dedicated to ghosts, including the gently comic variation on “love stronger than death,” in the case of Alan Rickman’s dead cellist haunting his grieving lover in Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), or Ghost (1990), featuring the frustrations of the ghosts as Patrick Swayze “saves” his living wife from his erstwhile murderer.38 To date, zombies themselves continue to thrive in the television series The Walking Dead (2010–).39

I note zombie scholarship via such pop references because Nietzsche is the zombie scholar of the Homer question as also of early Greek philosophy. Thus Heidegger begins his own reading of the Anaximander fragment by discounting, dead‐silencing, Nietzsche’s contribution. In his recently published Black Notebooks, Heidegger goes further: denouncing what he names the “fabulosity” of Nietzsche’s “supposed” rediscovery of the pre‐Platonic philosophers.40 Heidegger uses Nietzsche’s pre‐Platonics in place of Hermann Diels’s pre‐Socratics. It is no accident that Heidegger offers his own parallel rubric: pre‐Aristotelians. What Heidegger omits is any reference to Nietzsche’s extensive lecture courses on the topic.

To say that a scholar is scientifically “dead” is to say that the scholar is not cited and not that he never existed, not that his work was irrelevant. Normal science works, as Thomas Kuhn argues, by excluding certain paradigms, including entire traditions. If Nietzsche’s work on Diogenes Laërtius was indisputably foundational for his own field, this has not secured Nietzsche’s scholarly authority in that same field. Part of the reason for this overshadowing would be the general assessment of Diogenes Laërtius himself, declared “trivial” by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield while being “from our point of view important.”41 Thus Diogenes Laërtius is named “night‐porter to the history of Greek philosophy,” quoting Jonathan Barnes, who himself quotes Nietzsche: “no‐one can enter unless Diogenes has given him the key.”42 The distinction between Kirk, Raven, and Schofield’s “trivial” and Nietzsche’s “night porter” is a fine one. For today’s specialists in ancient history, including classics and ancient philosophy, Nietzsche is as dead to scholarship as Hermann Usener underlined the fact for his own students: anyone who writes in this way is “scientifically dead”—“wissenschaftlich todt.”43 The assertion holds to this day: scholars of ancient history, of ancient philosophy, of classical philology do not cite Nietzsche. There are rare exceptions, and even the exceptions carefully highlight academic reservations.

But how does one get to be “scientifically dead”? How does an accomplished scholar, called at an early age to an important professorial chair, whose work was recognized as being, as it would continue to be, influential for an entire discipline, nonetheless manage to become irrelevant in and to the working history of that same discipline? What happened? If few ask this question, answers are not lacking. Thus it is typically assumed that Nietzsche first missed his “true” calling as a famous philosopher and, in the course of a relatively short adult life, some three decades of productivity, simply whiled away two‐thirds of it on classical studies: ten years destroying his eyes to establish source scholarship as such (Thomas Brobjer’s work would provide support for this claim in its specificity),44 followed by a decade of teaching and writing as professor of classics in Basel. In this vision of Nietzsche’s personal becoming‐Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s twenty years of classical philology—Christian Benne counts twenty‐one years total in his monograph on this question45—was just a ‘wrong’ turn. Not only that, but experts will tell us that Nietzsche was lamentably bad at it—a junior classmate, Ulrich von Wilamowitz‐Möllendorff tells us so, and specialist scholars repeat the judgment—whereby, so the standard story goes, Nietzsche eventually came to his senses and proceeded to write Zarathustra and the Genealogy of Morals and so on.

All of this is myth.

What is not myth is personal attestation, as Nietzsche himself reports it, that Hermann Usener proposed a joint‐project with Nietzsche to prepare a scholarly source book of ancient Greek philosophers. Thus in a long letter written on June 16, 1869, from Nietzsche in Basel to Erwin Rohde in Rome, embedded in a paragraph musing on the likelihood of being “doch noch der futurus editor Laerti,” Nietzsche reports “in strictest confidence” that “Usener and I are planning a historical philosophical edition in which I participate with Laertius, he with Stobaeus, Pseudoplutarch etc. This sub sigillo.”46

On this account, what would ultimately come to be published as Diels’s Die Vorsokratiker was, at least at one stage, conceived jointly between Usener and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s claim antedates while also according with Diels’s later report that Usener transferred his original role in this project to Diels, and Diels tells us that the project was one that was to have been shared between Nietzsche and Diels. Today’s established scholars cite Diels’s later report47 without noting Nietzsche’s report of his planned collaboration with Usener.

Apart from all this, Nietzsche’s contribution to modern “source scholarship” had already been established with his publications on Diogenes Laërtius in the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, a leading classical journal.48 Thus Diels drew on Nietzsche’s research as a matter of course (he would not need to acknowledge this) for both his Doxographi Graeci (1879) and Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903).49

Death as History: personalities and succession theory

Who has ever put more water in their wine than the Greeks?—Nietzsche50

In his lectures on the pre‐Platonic philosophers, Nietzsche foregrounds philosophy as it appears in history.51 The first point is the sheer otherness of the Greek project.52 Framing his question in this historically hermeneutic fashion, Nietzsche underlines what Certeau emphasizes as a certain pathos, a “living solidarity with what has gone,” as Ruin cites The Writing of History (161). For Nietzsche, “What do we learn for the Greeks, we wish to ask, out of the history of their philosophy? Not, what do we learn for philosophy. We want to explain the fact that the Greeks practiced philosophy, something that is, given the ruling perspective on the Greeks, hardly self‐explanatory.”53 The question is hermeneutically minded (indebted to the concerns of his teacher Friedrich Ritschl), asking, first, how the Greeks moved “within themselves” toward philosophy, and, second, how the “philosopher” was present in and among the Greeks as such—this is for Nietzsche the question of the “person”—rather than merely how philosophy was specified—this is the question of philosophical doxa.54

The sole methodological access to such questions, so Nietzsche tells his students repeatedly, is and can only be the texts alone. Nietzsche reads his “pre‐Platonic philosophers” by foregrounding the initial need to first ascertain historical “facts,” for the sake of “doing” history as such, tracing alternate genealogies. The first lectures begin by emphasizing the importance of determining chronology, an emphasis that continues throughout. Herodotus reported Thales’s prediction of a datable solar eclipse, and Nietzsche cites then newly current astronomical research as decisive. There are, then, “fixed points” in Thales’s case.“55 For Anaximander, by contrast, the first datable event could only be “the conception and completion of his book πεϱὶ φύσεως.”56 The key for history is Anaximander qua author of the very first philosophical text, by contrast with Thales, who did not write. Nietzsche emphasizes the same point for Pythagoras and Socrates.57 In his Anaximenes lecture, Nietzsche details Apollodorus’s account of Anaximenes’s dates, foregrounding his “putative studentship” in received succession accounts: the Διαδοχαί.58

Teacher–student succession is a traditional means of asserting legitimacy whereby, as Nietzsche underlines, the motivation to establish it can lead to the suppression of contradictory chronologies. If one wants to argue succession, one will find it, just as Nietzsche will later tease that the Tübingen theologians go off into the bushes in search of, in their case: “faculties” [“Vermögen”].59 In this way, Plato argues on behalf of Socrates in his dialogues (thus Nietzsche includes Socrates as a pre‐Platonic philosopher), complete with various claims to studentship, including Parmenides and Anaxagoras. Conflicting claims for different teachers for the same thinker yield alternative genealogies of philosophy. The disparity between the views of teacher and student is as useless for clarifying matters in antiquity as it is for resolving disputes between thinkers today (think of Straussians but also Wittgensteinians and Cavellians, or Heideggerians, Derrideans, and such like).

Explicating both the givenness of authoritative dating and authoritative contradiction, skepticism will be required on rigorous historical grounds.60 Anaximenes cannot have been Anaximander’s student, by some two decades.61 Ancient accounts repeat an array of details already treated as idle at the time thus qua details “no one believes.” To this extent, “an sich,” Nietzsche argued, such accounts of teacherly succession would be “utterly unmethodical.”62 Tacking between such readings, Nietzsche foregrounds another account in Diogenes Laërtius whereby the twenty‐year‐old Anaximenes is claimed to have been Parmenides’s student (once again: two decades). Turning to the source for this testimony in Theophrastus, which sets Parmenides as a student of Anaximander, Nietzsche notes the dates of their flourishing for Anaximander at sixty‐four, giving Parmenides the studentship at twenty, such that forty‐four years later, likewise at the age of twenty, Anaximenes may be installed in the same lineage. The picture‐book chronology seems trustworthy yet by intercalating Parmenides on this “oldest” account, “thereby dies the διαδοχή Anaximander–Anaximenes.”63

Later chronologies shift the dates. Indeed, anyone who holds to the authoritative διαδοχή) is compelled, so Nietzsche writes, to date “retroactively,”64 following Simplicius, shifting both Anaxagoras and Anaximenes for the sake of the Ionian διαδοχή). Consequently Anaximander–Anaximenes become friends and contemporaries. Nietzsche encourages the student of ancient philology/ancient history to compare sources, by hermeneutic contrast. Here, we note Nietzsche’s thirteenth lecture on Anaxagoras, a lengthy lecture foregrounding chronology and “killed” by Nietzsche’s editors as reduplicative.65 Omitted from published versions of Nietzsche’s lecture courses for eighty‐two years, beginning with the 1913 Kroner edition,66 the editors, Otto Crusius and Wilhelm Nestle, refer the reader instead to Nietzsche’s thematization of Anaxagoras in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Obviously: Nietzsche speaks differently to his own students of philology than he does to a general public. The style and voice (and sometimes even the language of publication, not only German but also Latin) of Nietzsche’s source work (Diogenes Laërtius, Homer, Hesiod) differs from his more popular texts, such as his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. For the same reason, I noted pop culture examples above, as scholarly audiences differ from popular audiences while at the same time being included among them. And thus Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks omits the historical focus on chronology characteristic of the lecture courses.67

Nietzsche’s Anaxagoras lecture includes chronology and succession, emphasizing Anaxagoras’s primacy by contrast with doctrinal transmission, teacher to student, highlighting the personal account of Anaxagoras’s arrival in Athens. Not motivated in terms of studentship (given that there were no thinkers with whom Anaxagoras might have sought to study), there was, however, immediate bodily reason to flee Clazomenae in advance of the Persians.68 The Anaxagoras lecture remained unpublished until 1995, with inevitable losses for scholarship.69 Ruin’s book engages neither Nietzsche’s Homer nor Nietzsche’s pre‐Platonics nor Nietzsche’s repeated recourse to the metaphor of blood. Yet there is the working effect of what Ruin recalls for us as Michelet’s resurrectionism. On Nietzsche’s hermeneutic terms, we can only summon the voices of the dead past to limited life: we may call them to speak to us only on our terms and according to our taste. Thus Nietzsche reminds us of the danger of assuming that what we call the soul [die Seele—this would be Rohde’s Psyche] remains the same through all time. Per contra, the soul of the ancient master is ever and “yet another.” This otherness may perhaps be “greater,” Nietzsche argues, but it is at the same time “colder and distant from the allure of what is alive.”70 Here, I infuse the blood of current scholarship not simply for Nietzsche’s sake but in order to encourage others to bring the silent past to voice, as Heidegger wrote: re‐presenting it once again, “resurrected” in this Homeric sense, as Ruin reminds us via Certeau and Michelet—as there are so many ways of being with the dead.

Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Cf., Hikaru Suzuki, The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death (London: Black Swan, 2019).

See the first chapter, “Not Selling,” in Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited [1963, 1998] (New York: Knopf, 2011).

Susan Jacoby, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (New York: Pantheon, 2011).

F. Gonzalez‐Crussi, The Day of the Dead and Other Mortal Reflections (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1993).

Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Penguin Random House, 1995).

See Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health [1995] (London: Marion Boyars, 2010). See further, Babette Babich, “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show’: On the Expropriation of Death,” Nursing Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2018), 1–14.

Seamus O’Mahony, The Way We Die Now (London: Head of Zeus, 2016). See also O’Mahony’s retrospective account: “Medical Nemesis Forty Years On: The Enduring Legacy of Ivan Illich,” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 46, no. 2 (2016), 134–139.

Alphonso Lingis, “The Return of Extinct Religions,” New Nietzsche Studies 4, nos. 3 and 4 (2000–2001), 15–28.

Lewis Binford, “New Perspectives in Archaeology,” ed. James Brown, in Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology 25 (1971), 6–29.

10 John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002).

11 This citation forms the first line of the introduction to Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley [1975] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1, citing Jules Michelet, “L’heroïsme de l’esprit.”

12 Ethnographers are not always happy with their own—this is a common characteristic across the disciplines—but Bruno Latour has long been critically, reflectively engaged with his own discipline, not unlike Nietzsche, who wrote Wir Philologen as an indictment of his own field. More on Nietzsche below, but see here, and note the subtitle, Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, transl. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

13 I am enlightened here by discussions with Annette Hornbacher over a number of years; see Hornbacher, “Contested Moksa in Balinese Agama Hindu: Balinese Death Rituals between Ancestor Worship and Modern Hinduism,” in Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia, ed. Volker Gottowik, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 237–260.

14 See Babich, “‘The Answer is False’: Archaeologies of Genocide,” in Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, ed. Ryan Crawford and Erik M. Vogt (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016), 1–17, as well as Babich, “Nietzsche and/or/vs. Darwin,” Common Knowledge 20, no. 3 (2014), 404–411.

15 As Ruin writes: “The last lines of this infamous passage read: ‘The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal. At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again’” (105).

16 Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), 41–63.

17 Der wirklich ‘historische’ Vortrag würde gespenstisch zu Gespenstern reden.” Nietzsche, Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, §126, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 431. Hereafter KSA.

18 Erich Bethe, “Homerphilologie Heute und Künftig,” Hermes 70 (1935), 46–58.

19 Nietzsche, “Homer und die klassische Philologie. Ein Vortrag. Basel 1869,” in Frühe Schriften, ed. Carl Koch and Karl Schlechta (Munich: Beck, 1994), 283–306.

20 Ibid., 304.

21 Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra I, in KSA, 4, 48. Along with Hölderlin’s language of “Die Blume des Mundes,” I use Nietzsche’s language of both blood and flowers in Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

22 I cite Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Famous Philosophers, VIII, 59, after G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers [1983] (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 286.

23 J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury), 137.

24 Hugh Lloyd‐Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1982).

25 William J. Richardson, S. J., Heidegger from Phenomenology to Thought [1963] (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), xxviii.

26 Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, II §126; KSA 2.

27 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human II, transl. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 144.

28 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, transl. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 299. [Assorted Opinions and Maxims].

29 I discuss this in several essays; for one example, see Babich, “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Parodic Style: On Lucian’s Hyperanthropos and Nietzsche’s Übermensch,” Diogenes 58, no. 4 (2013), 58–74.

30 See my introduction, “Signatures and Taste: Hume’s Mortal Leavings and Lucian,” in Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” ed. Babette Babich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 3–22.

31 Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §408.

32 See David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

33 Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §400.

34 Cf. Alberto Bernabé and Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, “Arrival in the Subterranean World,” in Bernabé and Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 9–59.

35 Ibid., 9. See, with reference to Nietzsche, Benjamin Biebuyck et al., “Cults and Migrations: Nietzsche’s Meditations on Orphism, Pythagoreanism and the Greek Mysteries,” Philologos: Zeitschrift für Antike Literatur und Ihre Rezeption 149 (2005), 53–77ff.

36 See Nietzsche’s discussion in his fourteenth lecture (on Empedocles), Vorlesungs Aufzeichnungnen (WS 1871/72–WS 1874/75), Zweiter Abteilung, Vierter Band, ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), here 317. Hereafter KGW.

37 “Denn nur dadurch, dass wir ihnen unser Seele geben, vermögen sie fortzuleben: erst unser Blut bringt sie dazu, zu uns zu reden.” Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I, §126, “Aeltere Kunst und die Seele der Gegenwart,” KSA 2, 431.

38 Ghost is visually valuable for its hellish ghouls, in a Homeric‐Dantesque context, rising from steaming night‐time vapors, illuminated black and red, ascending to seize their victim in the dark arches beneath an elevated subway in New York City’s outer boroughs.

39 To this one may add reference to The Game of Thrones columbarium of faces dedicated to the God of Death, or, on another level, the Harry Potter film series based on Rowling’s popular novels, including Death Eaters and the dead‐named Lord Voldemort, complete with a redemptive death by Rickman’s Professor Snape, a salvation afforded by bodily fluids, in this case: tears, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 (2011). We can add Neil Gaiman’s purpose‐written American Gods (2001, cable broadcast 2017), including its references to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and a hastily constructed allusion to the death of the old gods in the world of the new. If American Indian deities are inevitably underrepresented, perhaps it is to leave room for Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.

40 Thereby Heidegger indicates a then‐current claim. See, for a discussion with specific reference to history, Babich, “Machenschaft and Seynsgeschichte in the Black Notebooks: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s ‘Rediscovery’ of the Greeks,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 51, no. 2 (2020), 110–123.

41 The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G. S. Kirk, J. Raven, and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2.

42 Ibid., 118. Here, Jonathan Barnes cites Nietzsche, Historisch‐Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, 5 vols., ed. Joachim Mette (Munich: Beck, 1933–1943), V, 126.

43 James Porter reviews of Nietzsche’s contributions to the discipline of classics, with bleak results, noting that “any Nietzsche may have had in the field of Presocratic philosophy will have consisted in a misprision and a reduction of the views variously on offer in his published and unpublished writings.” Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 391. Porter observes that Nietzsche’s work on his pre‐Platonics would not have been influential for Diels’s pre‐Socratics. This last is not in dispute as I argue that Nietzsche’s contribution would be his original source scholarship on Diogenes Laërtius: Nietzsche, “De Laertii Diogenis fontibus,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. Neue Folge, vols. 23 and 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Johann David Sauerländer, 1868–1869), 632–653; 181–228 [in Latin]; Nietzsche, “Analecta Laertiana,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. Neue Folge, vol. 25 (Frankfurt am Main: Sauerländer, 1870), 217–231 [in Latin] (and see note 45 below). This source scholarship was as useful for Diels’s work as it was similarly valuable for Usener’s Epicurea.

44 See Thomas Brobjer’s many publications and see, too, Christian Benne, cited below.

45 Christian Benne, Nietzsche und die historisch‐kritische Philologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 1.

46 “Usener nämlich und ich beabsichtigen ein philosophie‐historisches corpus, an dem ich mit Laertius, er mit Stobaeus, Pseudoplutarch usw. Participire. Dies sub sigillo.” Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), III, 18.

47 Cf. the beginning pages of Jaap Mansfeld and David Runia, Aetiana: The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer: The Sources (Philosophia Antiqua 73) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997). Mansfeld and Runia do not cite Nietzsche’s 1869 letter to Rohde, and Glenn Most surprisingly, as editor of Nietzsche’s philological writings, omits any reference to this complicated historical context in his “Friedrich Nietzsche: Between Philology and Philosophy,” New Nietzsche Studies 4, no. 1/2 (2000), 163–170, originally published in German in 1994.

48 See, too, Nietzsche, “Beiträge zur Kritik der griechischen Lyriker,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. Neue Folge, vol. 23 (Frankfurt am Main: Sauerländer, 1868), 480–489 as well as Nietzsche, “Der Florentinische Tractat über Homer und Hesiod, ihr Geschlecht und ihren Wettkampf,” Rhenisches Museum für Philologie. Neue Folge, vols. 25 and 28 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag von Johann David Sauerländer, 1870–1873), 528–540; 211–249.

49 Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, 1903). That there are elements of a certain Wirkungsgeschichte may be evidenced by the publication of Diels, Doxographi Graeci (Berlin: Wiedemann, 1879). See Heidegger on this constellation—it is not the subject of his discussion but a prelude to his reading of Anaximander first published in 1950. Cf. Heidegger, Der Spruch des Anaximander, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2010).

50 “Wer hat mehr Wasser in den Wein gegossen als die Griechen?” Nietzsche, Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, §336, KSA 2, 698.

51 Nietzsche, Vorlesung I in Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe, Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen, II, 2–5, ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995) [KGW] II4, 211. Nietzsche’s contrasting reference is to Hegel’s 1823 reflections on ancient philosophy from Thales to Aristotle. See G. W. F. Hegel, Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1966).

52 Nietzsche, Vorlesung I. KGW II4, 211.

53 Thus Nietzsche continues, “Wer sie als klare, nüchterne harmonische Praktiker auffaßt, wird nicht erklären können, woher ihnen die Philosophie kam. Und wer sie wiederum nur als ästhetische, in Kunstschwärmereien aller Art schwelgende Menschen versteht, wird sich auch durch ihre Philosophie befremdet fühlen.” Nietzsche, KGW II4, 211.

54 Ibid., 212.

55 Ibid., 231.

56 Ibid., 239–240.

57 Historically methodological, Nietzsche proceeds to discuss Pythagoras, relaying his friend Rhodes’s epithet for Pythagoras as “grandmaster of superstition,” that is, ancient or primitive belief, noting that like Thales, Pythagoras left no writings (whereby to be sure “Pythagorean philosophy” is a different, later tradition linked with names other than Pythagoras and key to Greek mathematics and Greek music theory). Nietzsche, GW 4, 288; cf. KGW II4, 252.

58 See, again, Nietzsche, Die Διαδοχαί der vorplatonische Philosophen [1868–1869] (Philologische Niederschriften und Notizen aus der Leipziger Zeit), KGW II4. The editors date this lecture course as offered in 1874 and again in 1876.

59 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §11.

60 Nietzsche, KGW II4, 247.

61 The contradiction counters the theory of succession on ancient authority: “thus Apollodorus denies studentship, he denies the διαδοχή.” Nietzsche, KGW II4, 247.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 248.

64 Ibid., 249.

65 Ibid., 302–313.

66 See Nietzesche’s Werke. Philologica. Unveröffentliehtes zur antiken Religion und Philosophie, ed. Otto Crusius und Wilhelm Nestle (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1913), specifically, beginning with the course given in 1875–76: Der Gotterdienst der Griechen.

67 Indeed, one may also find this dating replicated as Die Διαδοχαί der vorplatonische Philosophen (1873–74) KGW II4, 613–632. The lecture on succession, although omitted from the English translation, may be found in the French translation, Les philosophes préplatoniciens suivi de les διαδοχαί des philosophes. Texte établi à partir des manuscrits, transl. Nathalie Ferrand (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 1994).

68 Here to quote Xenophanes: “In winter, sprawled upon soft cushions, replete and warm, munching on chick‐peas and drinking sweet wine by the fire, that is the time to ask each other: As if to Odysseus: ‘Who, and from where, and why art thou?’—or, with a wink, ‘And how many years are on your back, Bold‐Heart?’—or quietly, ‘Had you yet reached man’s estate when the Persians came?’”

69 The exclusion was fateful for the history of philosophy, historically speaking, noting the difference that had to have been made by the omission of the Anaxagoras lecture for Francis MacDonald Cornford’s reading between Plato and Pythagoras. To unpack that would take more than just another paper, and Nietzsche’s lectures remain to be tapped for philosophical, historical, and philological scholarship. Cf., however, Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912) in addition to Cornford’s discussion of Plato and Parmenides as well of Plato’s Cosmology and his The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays [1950] (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

70 Nietzsche, KSA 2, 431.

Babette Babich


RUIN, Hans. Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 272p. Resenha de: BABICH, Babette. Blood for the ghosts: reading Ruin’s Being With the dead with Nietzsche. History and Theory. Middletown, v.59, n. 2, p.255-269, jun. 2020. Acessar publicação original [IF].

An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present / Elías J. Palti

After the upheavals of 1989–90, there it was for a brief moment: this idea that all ideological disputes had finally (or unfortunately?) come to an end, that at least the global “differend” (in Lyotard’s sense)1 had dissolved, because one system of world interpretation and world domination, the liberal market economy, had prevailed over all others. The posthistoire seemed to have won out for a brief historical moment, this simultaneously liberating and frightening and decadent vision of a world society in which something is still going on, but nothing fundamental is happening.2 This would also have brought the political to its end, understood as the social form of negotiation and debate over the organization of collectives, as concretized in communications, standardizations, and institutionalizations. After the end of history, the political would then be replaced by the functioning of a politics that would only have had to administer what had been achieved by 1989–90.

As is generally known, things turned out differently. The binary scheme of the twentieth century3 did not dissolve into the unambiguity of a market‐liberal world domination, but led to a new obscurity.4 The political proved to be very resistant to politics. It was obviously not finished with a bored administration of what had been achieved. Rather, the space of the political, in which the formations and institutions of collectives are disputed, proved to be still unfinished and inconclusive. The lines of conflict have multiplied and changed constantly since the end of the Cold War. The world appeared to be confused by the resurrection of actors long believed to have been overcome, who suddenly populated the field of politics again: Nationalisms, fundamentalisms, and populisms have since experienced an unforeseen renaissance, even though not only the teachings of the Enlightenment, but also the dialectics of the Enlightenment5 had promised that all this would finally be overcome.

Since the end of the twentieth century, one can continue to wonder how lively, tricky, and imaginative the political is. Neither political nor historical analysis has stopped asserting that atavistic elements could reappear, that historical backwardness could creep into our present, or that a relapse into the Middle Ages could be observed (quite apart from the fact that this would be an insult to the Middle Ages). Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Brexit, nationalist governments in Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, or talk of a struggle between believers and unbelievers—all these phenomena are not simply undead from the past who do not want to disappear. Instead, we are dealing with a new constitution of the political, for the appropriate description of which we do not yet seem to have the right language.

Against this background, it is only too understandable to ask the question of what this political could be in a historical and theoretical sense, this political in which fundamental questions of collectives are disputed. The Argentine historian Elías José Palti chooses a double approach in his “archaeology of the political.” He doubts the existence of a quasi time‐independent essence of the political and tries to emphasize its historical emergence. He recognizes three decisive phases in the history of the political that can be roughly discerned in the seventeenth century, around 1800, and in the twentieth century. In addition to the historical description, Palti also undertakes a theoretical reflection, beginning with the almost classical starting point of Carl Schmitt, followed by the discussion as it has developed in particular since the late twentieth century with the participation of Lefort, Rancière, Badiou, Agamben, Mouffe, Laclau, and others. One cannot claim that since then it has really been clarified what exactly this substantiated adjective “the political” is supposed to address. But that is probably what makes this concept so attractive (for me as well), that, unlike “politics,” it does not pretend to be clearly definable. It is precisely blurriness and flexibility that characterize the political.

Palti wants to nail this jelly to the wall with historical tools. He marks the beginning of the political in the seventeenth century:

The opening up of the horizon of the political is the result of a crucial inflection that was produced in the West in the seventeenth century as a consequence of a series of changes in the regimes of exercise of power brought about by the affirmation of absolute monarchies. It is at this point that the series of dualisms articulating the horizon of the political emerged, giving rise to the play of immanence and transcendence hitherto unknown. (xviii)

Even though I have great sympathy for a privileging of the seventeenth century due to my own research focus, I am not sure whether this setting is convincing. Especially in the world of (formerly) Roman Catholic Christendom after the Reformation, one can certainly find many reasons to let the political begin in this constellation. But to identify the “absolutist monarchies” as a starting point then runs the risk of appearing a little too Hegelian (for it was Hegelianism that contributed decisively to the establishment of the concept of “absolutism,” because it regarded it as a necessary step in the establishment of the “modern state”).6

Why should the political have become relevant only in absolutism? One can hardly imagine a form of human cooperation and opposition in which the political should not have been important. Let’s take the fresco cycle by Ambrogio Lorenzetti from the fourteenth century about good and bad government in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, a popular example to illustrate medieval understandings of politics—but also an example of a problematization of the political.7 Or let us take the even more well‐known metaphor of the king’s two bodies.8 In my opinion, both examples could serve to explain Palti’s central concern, namely the relationship between immanence and transcendence. It is their mediation that for him is at the center of the question of the political, namely how the meaning and goal of the political can be justified with a view to a superordinate context (whatever name it may answer to). Palti calls this connection the “justice effect.” But this question also arose before the seventeenth century, albeit perhaps in the opposite direction: it was not so much the transcendent that was in question, but the immanent that had to prove itself in the name of the transcendent.

Palti has this connection in mind. The first chapter of his book is devoted to the “theological genesis of the political.” In it he explicitly poses the question of how the political has developed out of the theological, namely in clear demarcation from this precursor model. For Palti, the political is thus fundamentally new and fundamentally different from the theological attempt to determine the relationship between transcendence and immanence. Thus, he distinguishes himself from Giorgio Agamben, who in The Kingdom and the Glory9 emphasized the continuity between the two discourses. Palti even understands his entire argumentation as a reply to Agamben, whose argument he wants to refute (184).

If it were up to me to choose between Palti and Agamben, I would vote for Agamben. In the context of this review, this will lead me to disagree with some of Palti’s arguments. These responses do not mean, however, that this is a bad book. On the contrary, I would strongly recommend reading it for thematic, methodological, and theoretical reasons. However, my view of the problems presented here is partly different.

Let us begin with some methodological considerations: Palti presents a conceptual history with which he explicitly wants to set himself apart from a history of ideas. For quite understandable reasons, he considers the history of ideas to be anachronistic because it transfers current ideas to past conditions and examines their occurrence there.

One may, however, suspect that his conceptual history does not escape anachronism either. For example, if Palti (in parallel to Koselleck’s “Sattelzeit”10) identifies a “Schwellenzeit” (threshold time) between 1550 and 1650 in which the political gradually detached itself from the theological—isn’t that already an anachronistic statement? Doesn’t one have to know already that one has crossed a threshold before one can state that there was a corresponding threshold time? Isn’t it fundamentally anachronistic to have information at one’s disposal of which past contemporaries could not yet know anything, namely that their approach to the questions of transcendence and immanence could still be relevant in the early twenty‐first century?

In other words, can there be any historical approach at all that is free of anachronism? And by that I don’t mean the case of chronologically wrong classification, of manual error. I mean the mixing of times: Historical questioning must be anachronistic insofar as it brings times that are not simultaneous into contact with one another—and this happens in a highly productive way.

Another difficulty with conceptual history arises from Palti’s claim not to want to rely on ideas alone, like the history of ideas (whatever might be meant by “ideas”). He aims rather at “analyzing how the terrain within which those options could take shape was historically articulated” (28). However, if you look at the terrain that is being paced here, it turns out to be rather sparsely populated. Palti bases his argumentation on a few selected examples whose representativeness is not always plausible. He analyzes extensively Greco’s painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, the writing “Defensio fidei” by Francisco Suarez, plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, and Lope de Vega, the essay by the Capuchin monk Joaquin de Finestrad entitled “El vasallo instruido” from the late eighteenth century, examples from serial music, as well as political and legal theoretical treatises by Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen. This is not a complete enumeration, but these are the essential examples that Palti refers to in order to prove the conceptual development of the political over three centuries. Why these persons and artifacts should be representative for the corresponding development is not always clear. One could well have imagined a different selection—above all, a selection that could have illustrated completely different paths of development.

I would like to explain this by using the example of the discussion about absolutism. Palti assumes that absolutism, with the changed position of the monarch, also fundamentally changed the constitution of the political. One can see it that way. This has often been done in traditional historiography on this subject. But what Palti completely ignores are the other stories that can be told about the European seventeenth century and about absolutism.

Doubts about the model of absolutism have been expressed for decades. They condensed into an international debate in 1992, when Nicholas Henshall’s book The Myth of Absolutism was published.11 Since then, the general assessment has been that although there was a political theory of absolutism in the seventeenth century, in practice it permanently failed and reached its limits. This can be well substantiated for the supposed prime example of absolutism, the French monarchy.

Now the debate about whether absolutism has functioned as political practice or not would not have to play a major role for Palti’s conceptual history—because he does not care about the question of actual implementation. What is striking, however, is the limitation that Palti imposes in his description of absolutism and the seventeenth century. He describes this period at least with a view to the political as if absolutism had been the clearly dominant model. And that is not the case. There have been numerous other strands of discussion and practices in which the political has become relevant in this period: republicanism, utopias, communalism, resistance theory, uprisings, revolutions. With reduction and unification, however, Palti’s conceptual history, which claims to take the historical contexts into account, falls into a similar imbalance as the history of ideas itself, from which he wants to distinguish himself.

The reductionism Palti applies is ultimately intended to illustrate the break that he needs in the history of the political in order to make his thesis plausible. He superimposes his idea of the birth of the political in absolutism with a secularization thesis à la Max Weber: the disenchantment of the world. Now, in absolutism, the monarch has the task of creating the unity that no longer goes without saying. I would rather say: Absolutism brings with it (on the theoretical level) a shift in the political discussion, but does not represent a discursive rupture. The theological does not disappear. It moves to new places.

An essential concern of Palti’s becomes clear with this supposed break caused by absolutism—as well as a clear difference from Agamben’s argumentation in The Kingdom and the Glory. Whereas Agamben emphasizes the continuity that exists between theological and secular justifications of the political, Palti emphasizes the break. The political, which raises its head in the seventeenth century, represents something fundamentally new for him.

I, too, would rather emphasize continuity—and this with examples that are in part quite similar to those of Palti. It is therefore less a matter of diametrical views, but of different interpretations of quite similar facts.

What is connected with this is not least the question of the historical location and the essential characteristics of modernity. If one emphasizes with Palti a break in the seventeenth century (the otherwise classic historical site of modern self‐affirmation, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, plays a rather minor role in its depiction), then one first identifies ex negativo a period that is characterized above all by not yet being like “the present” and by not yet living in the circumstances that “we” do. Those in the present can constitute themselves by distinguishing themselves from the premodern (living in a different time or a different space).

If one understands, as already said, the political (in contrast to politics) as the unfinished and unclosable space in which questions of the organization of collectives are negotiated, then Palti is certainly right when he states that something not insignificant changed in this space in the seventeenth century. But is it a clear rupture?

I would rather say it is a reversal of the signs while retaining the basic problem—and in this respect I also distrust the self‐description of modernity. The problem of the political is shifting into transcendence. Although until the seventeenth century, the afterlife could be regarded as a fixed point and the here and now an uncertain problem zone, the transcendent increasingly became a problem in the wake of the Reformation. In this world one had to come to other forms of (self‐)insurance.12 And in this immanent world, other (modern) forms of transcendentally oriented ways of faith were developed, which structurally had (and have) similarities with the supposedly premodern ones: the belief in growth, progress, nation, subject, and so on.13

With the help of Niklas Luhmann, the question could be raised as to how system–environment relations were redesigned and which boundaries were actually used to enable the distinction between immanence and transcendence.14 One could then probably conclude that in the seventeenth century this distinction underwent a new shaping. The question now gradually became conceivable whether God makes decisions for the world, or whether transcendent connections must be created from immanent processes. Legitimation, one could say with Luhmann, succeeded now less and less with an otherworldly God, but had to be achieved with worldly procedures.15

The question now, however, is whether with this shift a new epoch dawned, even a new world arose in which the political, which had never existed before, first came to light.

Starting from the break with absolutism, Palti’s depiction takes further steps in chronological order. One chapter is devoted to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the emergence of democracy. It refers to Latin America, and more specifically to the political theory of Joaquín de Finestrad. Also in this historical context, which is usually identified with the code “French Revolution,” the argumentation continues: How can a new transcendence be founded from immanence?

Around 1800, this question arises in the context of the emergence of the nation. Here, with “history,” another God‐substitute is used to answer the question of transcendence. With the help of “history,” the nation is detached from the political and becomes naturalized (103). And in such procedures I see more continuities than Palti does, because there are structural similarities between the functions that “God” and “history” take over.

Palti then describes the twentieth century in the sense of a return to the Baroque—on the one hand. For as in the seventeenth century, dualisms break open, reason and history, truth and knowledge, politics and society fall apart. On the other hand, however, in the twentieth century (unlike in the Baroque) transcendence no longer holds the promise of an all‐encompassing unity. Rather, it is the source of contingency that causes systems and orders to falter. To explain this development with the help of serial music, as Palti does, is possible, but not immediately comprehensible. Palti at least claims that the fundamental matrix that can be observed in serial music is underpinned by contemporary thinking about the political. In spite of sympathy for twentieth‐century new music, this connection is not immediately obvious to me. Here a little more argumentative reasoning would have been necessary.16

Palti summarizes the developments of the twentieth century as an age of form in which the historical and evolutionary of the nineteenth century were replaced by the discontinuous. Every new form (and serial music is an example of this) is made possible by a comprehensive reconfiguration of the system (125–126).

Finally, Palti identifies three epochs in his archaeology of the political: the epochs of representation (Baroque), of history (around 1800), and of form (twentieth century). In each of these epochs, the question of the relationship between transcendence and immanence is clarified in different ways.

If we move from Palti’s analysis further into our own present in the early twenty‐first century, we might conclude that, after the three phases of the constitution of the political that Palti introduced, we now find ourselves in the already implied situation of exuberant complexity of the political, precisely because coordinates believed to be certain have been lost, and established strategies no longer seem to function. The closer Palti moves to the early twenty‐first century, the more important emptiness becomes in describing the political. He identifies the concept of the subject as an empty signifier (51, 142) and treats paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Robert Rauschenberg that deal with the emptying of the picture surface (172–176).

In this very emptiness, I would also like to identify the culmination point that is constitutive for discussions about the political. Because the unfinished and unclosable space of the political has no ultimate anchor point, some collectives are quite desperately busy setting such a point. In the afterlife, in the origin, in the telos—wherever it may be found, sooner or later it turns out to be a void. And it is precisely with such empty spaces that collectives seem to have problems. Therefore, I consider postfundamentalist theories (also treated by Palti) to be very helpful in tackling this problem.17

Palti seems to me, however, to meet the problem of the empty foundation of the political only halfway, because he names and describes it, but immediately encloses it again in a historical representation including an epoch model. So Palti’s three phases are too simple. They are too simple because there are only three, and they are too simple because they are too clear. Palti is thus stymied in the interpretation he analyzed for the nineteenth century, the epoch of history. The linear sequence of the models of the political in his argument ultimately becomes the foundation of the political par excellence: the political exists because there is the specific history of the political. This entails the danger that everything is subject to the historical—with the exception of history itself.

Palti’s epochalization of the political thus goes hand in hand with the danger of fundamentalization. Each epoch designation carries the message that, thanks to it, one has found out what a certain time now really “is.” However, the critic of the “jargon of authenticity,” Theodor W. Adorno, has already stated (and explicitly with respect to the Baroque) that epoch designations are incapable of expressing historical complexity. They grasp only mediocrity, but could hardly cover anything that was not subordinate to this average.18 The same must be said of Palti’s Archaeology of the Political: an instructive, scholarly book that offers many insights, but which, with its epochalization, does not do justice to the complexity that arises in the dynamics between the temporal and the political. For these dynamics we probably need a new language, new forms of description, which are not yet available to us as a matter of course.

How about taking seriously the offers of avant‐garde painting that Palti quotes toward the end of his book? What if the white surface of a painting by Malevitch or the erased drawings of a Rauschenberg were taken as an opportunity to reflect more closely on questions of emptiness, negation, representability, and unrepresentability, especially in the historiographical context? Then it would not only be a matter of the possibilities of describing the political, but also of the possibilities of depicting the historical.

It is here that a problem with Palti reveals itself, which seems to me worth discussing about his approach. He relies too much on the historical as the backbone of his argumentation and presentation. For as right and important as it is to question the constitution of the political, it must seem strange to use the historical as its unquestioned support.

It would have been interesting to see how Palti’s argumentation would have changed if he had not relied on the linear logic of chronology, but had made even clearer the respective references and actualizations over time. His view from the seventeenth century to the present would have offered some clues, because it was not by chance that the Baroque was revalued by the discussions about postmodernism and that philosophers such as Spinoza, Pascal, or Leibniz have received much more attention since the end of the twentieth century.

The subject of the political would thus enable the investigation of the folds of time that become relevant when presences refer to absent times. These references are indeed not always linear, but much more creative and complex than the idea of the timeline suggests. Another history of the political would arise in this way. But it, too, would show (in another way) what Palti had intended in his book: that the political is not time‐independent in character.

Notes

1. Jean François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

2. Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (New York: Verso, 1992); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

3. Alain Badiou, The Century (New York: Polity Press, 2007).

4. Jürgen Habermas, “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 11, no. 2 (1986), 1–18.

5. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

6. Reinhard Blänkner, “Absolutismus”: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Studie zur politischen Theorie und zur Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, 1830–1870 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2011).

7. Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” in Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit: die Argumentation der Bilder, ed. H. Belting and D. Blume (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), 85–103.

8. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

9. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

10. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

11. Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992).

12. The sociologist Elena Esposito has convincingly described this process with respect to the seventeenth century insofar as she has shown the new possibilities of designing other realities by means of probability calculus and fictional literature: Elena Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).

13. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

14. Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).

15. Niklas Luhmann, Legitimation durch Verfahren (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969).

16. For another description of the connection between politics and New Music, see Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007).

17. Oliver Marchart, Post‐foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Similar arguments can be found in a still very current book by Leo Shestov, All Things Are Possible (New York: R. M. McBride & Co., 1920).

18. Theodor W. Adorno, “Der mißbrauchte Barock,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10/1: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 401–422.

Achim Landweh


PALTI, Elías José. An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Columbia University. Press, 2017. 235p. Resenha de: LANDWEH, Achim. The (dis)continuous history of the political. History and Theory. Middletown, v.58, n. 3, p.451-459, sept. 2019. Acessar publicação original [IF].

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