Historv and Theon, 45 (February 2006), 147-152

BOOKS IN SUMMARY

SUBLIME HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE. By Frank Ankersmit. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2005. Pp. xviii, 481.

Western philosophy has been unkind to the notion of experience. Any domain that expe-rience might have believed to be its safe and rightful possession was always claimed byits two greedy competitors: the knowing subject and the known object. Just as Poland'spolitical independence was always threatened by the presence of its two ever-so-aggres-sive neighbors, Russia and Prussia, so was experience's fate always sealed in Westernepistemology by the aggressiveness of the knowing subject and the object of which it hasknowledge. Western philosophy has been a permanent seesaw between idealism (subject)and realism (object)-and experience was invariably the main victim in this perennialphilosophical tug of war. The only tiny enclave still left to it was that of the scientificexperiment. But even here experience could exist only as the subject's powerless satel-lite-as is demonstrated by the triumph of contextualism, of the thesis of the theory-ladenness of empirical fact, and of their many more or less fashionable variants.Knowledge and language reign supreme over experience, as was so well summed up inRorty's slogan "language goes all the way down."

Perhaps philosophy adequately reflects what happens in the sciences. But this nullifi-cation of experience is surely wrong for history and the humanities. In history and thehumanities you can rarely tell with precision where the subject (the historian) ends andwhere the object (the past) begins: the subject is "in" the object and the object "in" thesubject, so to speak. And then large and indefinite stretches come into being between thesubject and the object in which experience can grow and prosper. This book is a firstattempt at a philosophical exploration of this strange and forgotten territory of (historical)experience.

It does so 1) by suggesting how experience lies at the end of the road running fromQuine, to Davidson, to Rorty and beyond; 2) by investigating what Goethe, Eichendorff,Burckhardt, Benjamin, and Huizinga have said about historical experience; 3) howGadamer came closest to a satisfactory conception of historical experience, but thenstrayed from the right path since he lacked the courage to disconnect experience and truth;4) in what way our conception of the past arises from historical experience; and 5) how allthis has its antecedents in Rousseau and, especially, in Holderlin. Taken as a whole, thisbook is a fierce and uncompromising attack on all that has come to be known as "theory"in the last three to four decades (for example, structuralism, post-structuralism, decon-structivism, semiotics, tropology, all variants of hermeneutics, and so on); it recommendsthe abandonment of the rationalism of "theory" for the romanticism of experience.

This is not a book for everybody, for it addresses unusual and highly impractical ques-tions about how our notion of the past comes into being, what is the origin and nature ofhistorical consciousness and about how we relate to the past; it nowhere discusses themore familiar problems of historical writing. So the book has nothing to say to readersbelieving that the agenda of the philosopher of history should never contain items that arenot reducible to issues of truth, explanation, and narrative.

E R. A.

Wesleyan University 2(X)6 ISSN: (K)J18-2656

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TITLE: [SUBLIME HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE]SOURCE: History and Theory 45 no1 F 2006PAGE(S): 147

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