Sunteți pe pagina 1din 2

Wesleyan University

Sublime Historical Experience by Frank Ankersmit


Review by: F. R. A.
History and Theory, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Feb., 2006), p. 147
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590730 .
Accessed: 19/12/2014 08:02
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History
and Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 200.59.229.133 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:02:51 AM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

History and Theory45 (February2006), 147-152

? Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

BOOKS IN SUMMARY

SUBLIME
HISTORICAL
EXPERIENCE.
By Frank Ankersmit. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 481.
Westernphilosophy has been unkindto the notion of experience. Any domain that experience might have believed to be its safe and rightfulpossession was always claimed by
its two greedy competitors:the knowing subject and the known object. Just as Poland's
political independencewas always threatenedby the presence of its two ever-so-aggressive neighbors, Russia and Prussia, so was experience's fate always sealed in Western
epistemology by the aggressiveness of the knowing subjectand the object of which it has
knowledge. Westernphilosophy has been a permanentseesaw between idealism (subject)
and realism (object)-and experience was invariably the main victim in this perennial
philosophical tug of war. The only tiny enclave still left to it was that of the scientific
experiment. But even here experience could exist only as the subject's powerless satellite-as is demonstratedby the triumphof contextualism, of the thesis of the theoryladenness of empirical fact, and of their many more or less fashionable variants.
Knowledge and language reign supremeover experience, as was so well summed up in
Rorty's slogan "languagegoes all the way down."
Perhapsphilosophy adequatelyreflects what happensin the sciences. But this nullification of experience is surely wrong for history and the humanities. In history and the
humanitiesyou can rarely tell with precision where the subject (the historian)ends and
where the object (the past) begins: the subject is "in"the object and the object "in"the
subject, so to speak. And then large and indefinitestretchescome into being between the
subject and the object in which experience can grow and prosper.This book is a first
attemptat a philosophicalexplorationof this strangeand forgottenterritoryof (historical)
experience.
It does so 1) by suggesting how experience lies at the end of the road runningfrom
Quine, to Davidson, to Rorty and beyond; 2) by investigatingwhat Goethe, Eichendorff,
Burckhardt,Benjamin, and Huizinga have said about historical experience; 3) how
Gadamer came closest to a satisfactory conception of historical experience, but then
strayedfrom the rightpathsince he lacked the courageto disconnectexperienceandtruth;
4) in what way our conceptionof the past arises from historicalexperience;and 5) how all
this has its antecedentsin Rousseau and, especially, in H61derlin.Taken as a whole, this
book is a fierce and uncompromisingattackon all that has come to be known as "theory"
in the last three to four decades (for example, structuralism,post-structuralism,deconstructivism,semiotics, tropology,all variantsof hermeneutics,and so on); it recommends
the abandonmentof the rationalismof "theory"for the romanticismof experience.
This is not a book for everybody,for it addressesunusualand highly impracticalquestions abouthow our notion of the past comes into being, what is the origin and natureof
historical consciousness and about how we relate to the past; it nowhere discusses the
more familiar problems of historical writing. So the book has nothing to say to readers
believing thatthe agendaof the philosopherof history should never containitems that are
not reducibleto issues of truth,explanation,and narrative.
F. R. A.

This content downloaded from 200.59.229.133 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:02:51 AM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

S-ar putea să vă placă și