Chiel van den Akker

In her Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit, Sally Sedgwick sets out to: specify the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history. Hegel’s concern with our reason’s development conveys not just his fascination with the past but his interest in how reason responds to and is anchored in and shaped by the past. (TH: 4)In the first part of the book Sedgwick is concerned with freedom being temporally conditioned. The second part consists of the last two chapters and is concerned with the claim that ‘all our thought is indebted to this actual realm as well’ (TH: 8). Hegel repeatedly asserts, Sedgwick notes, ‘that none of us can escape our time in thought’ (TH: 143).

At times we are told that our habitual way of thinking has become obsolete given the new challenge we are facing. Some of the conceptual resources at our disposal are no longer capable of addressing the challenge at hand. Therefore, they lose their appeal and are rejected. But only in contrast to these intellectual resources does the challenge appear as a challenge. So it seems that we are confronted with a paradox: we need the intellectual resources for their uselessness. For a proper understanding of this paradox and to unravel it, I will distinguish between de dicto and de re readings of philosophical texts. This distinction is borrowed from the neo-pragmatist Robert Brandom. A de dicto reading of a text is concerned with what its author says. A de re reading of a text is concerned with what its author talks about. Unpacking this distinction allows us to evaluate the method of engaging with our stock of conceptual resources as part of scholarly argument.

We do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics. This essay is concerned with this bold and important thesis. It will do so in the context of the politics of historical representation and the fact–value and subjectivity–objectivity distinctions. The subject was also dear to the heart of Ankersmit’s late American colleague Hayden White. Ankersmit is concerned with how historical representations support a future course of action. White, by contrast, was (also) concerned with how historical representations limit a future course of action since they cannot serve as a basis for utopian politics.

In his famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin tells us that in his time art became valued for its exhibition value instead of what he refers to as its secularised ritual or cult value. This essay makes this bold claim plausible by arguing that it means that a historicising gaze no longer has a function in the reception of art. Although this argument is supported by Benjamin’s use of the concepts of authenticity and aura, it is somehow missed by Benjamin’s many readers. His essay, as it turns out, presents an end of history thesis, which foreshadows the condition of the image in contemporary media.

The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History addresses a wide range of philosophical problems about history and the semantics of time. The point of departure is the distinction between events under the description of past witnesses and their contemporaries and events under the description of historians. Its main claim is that a thesis on the past is exemplified rather than being justified by the available evidence. Such thesis, the book argues, retroactively becomes concrete in the past under consideration. This book will not only appeal to philosophers and historians, but to students and scholars across the humanities.

The “exemplification theory of history” is proposed to account for the relationship between the past and historical narratives. The theory states that what belongs to the past according to some narrative does so in order to exemplify the historical thesis of that narrative. As such the theory explains how the past receives its meaning. This implies that the past has no intrinsic historical meaning itself. Moreover, it follows that historical narratives possess an autonomy of their own with regard to the past. It is argued that the exemplification theory of history goes to the heart of narrativist philosophy of history. This claim is supported by the key arguments of three narrativist philosophers: Arthur Danto, Louis Mink and Frank Ankersmit. The distinction between the history of social individuals and the identification of such individuals turns out to be fundamental in this respect. The article concludes by distinguishing between a Platonic and an Aristotelian view on narrative and by explaining why we ought to prefer the former to the latter

The problem how to ascertain the truth about the past is as old as history itself. But until the work of Louis Mink, no clear distinction was made between questions concerning the truth of statements on the past and questions concerning the truth of historical narratives as a whole. A narrative, Mink argues, is not simply a conjunction of statements on the past. Therefore its truth cannot be a function of the truth of its individual statements. The problem of narrative truth is according to him thus: although each statement asserting a relation between events is subject to confirmation and disconfirmation, the combination of interrelations as established by the historical narrative is not, even though such combination of interrelations represents a real combination in past reality and is claimed to be true. As if to further complicate the problem, Mink maintains that history shares its form with fiction. Three and a half decades after Mink formulated the problem of narrative truth, it has not been dealt with in a satisfying manner. Mink does not solve nor dissolve the problem he posed. That task is taken up in this essay. It will move us away from the vocabulary of literary theory towards a pragmatist account of narrative truth

This essay takes Arthur Danto’s end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by arguing that we need the latter if we want to properly assess the plausibility of the end-of-art thesis.