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Philosophy of history afterHayden WhiteAlexander Lyon Macfiea

a Independent scholarPublished online: 30 May 2014.

To cite this article: Alexander Lyon Macfie (2014): Philosophy of history afterHayden White, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, DOI:10.1080/13642529.2014.918739

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BOOK REVIEW

Philosophy of history after Hayden White, edited by Robert Doran, London,

Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 256 pp., £120 (hardback), ISBN 9781441108210

Philosophy of History After Hayden White, edited by Robert Doran, of the

University of Rochester, USA (2013), is a collection of academic articles on

philosophy of history of extraordinary erudition, sufficient to make even the most

enthusiastic student of the subject pale before the intellectual challenge. As for

the practising historian, who might be expected to take an interest in the subject,

even the most patient and determined might find it difficult, if not impossible, to

cope with; although the occasional attention given in the collection to White’s

ground-breaking book, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the

Nineteenth Century (1973) and to his concept of figuralism may ease the burden

somewhat. (Doran claims that if there is a unifying theme in Philosophy of

History After Hayden White, it is figuralism, 33.)

In his useful and generally comprehensible introduction to Philosophy of

History After Hayden White, Doran explains how in the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, history was divided between a universalising, totalising

speculative branch of the subject (Hegel, Marx, Croce, Spengler, Toynbee) and a

professional, empirical branch of the sort inspired by von Ranke. What White did

in Metahistory, Doran argues, is to show that all great historians, regardless of

their intention, use in their work a metaphysics or philosophy of history. Thus, the

cardinal opposition commonly believed to exist between straight history and

philosophy of history is not warranted, as the possible modes of historiography

are the same as the possible modes of speculative philosophy. In short then, there

can be no proper history that is not also a philosophy of history – a point that

entirely escaped me when I eventually got round to reading Metahistory

somewhat belatedly in the 1990s. (I thought at the time that the principal point of

the work was to establish the essentially literary nature of history.)

In coming to this conclusion, White it seems was much influenced by

Christopher Dawson, a mid-twentieth-century British Catholic historian, and by

Jean-Paul Sartre, the well-known French existentialist, whose Being and

Nothingness (1956) was popular at the time. Sartre’s existentialist philosophy

also persuaded White to adopt one of his favourite ideas, namely that one chooses

one’s own past, and by so doing effectively chooses one’s own future (for Sartre to

‘choose’ does not necessarily imply the ability to obtain).

Doran does not limit his search for the origins of White’s Metahistory to

Dawson and Sartre. In addition, he also draws attention to the influence of

White’s first significant history teacher, at Wayne State University, William

J. Bossenbrook; Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and Richard Rorty’s

Rethinking History, 2014

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watershed anthology, The Linguistic Turn (1967). But he makes it clear that

White’s most immediate methodological influences were Northrop Frye’s notion

of archetypes in literary history, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Eric Auerbach’s

historicisation of the concept of realistic representation, in Mimesis (1953), and

Giambattista Vico’s philosophical and tropological approach to cultural history,

in Scienza Nuova ([1725] 1968).

At this point, it might be interesting to note White’s own recent estimation of

Metahistory in the introduction to a recent edition of Rethinking History (17.4,

2013) (which incidentally is given over almost entirely to the work of Hayden

White). Metahistory, White remarks, is now what he is sure it always was, a

‘cluster of fragments held together if at all by will and industry’. The illusion of

wholeness, which every writer tries to create, has now been shattered by the

critical process to which it has been exposed.

There are nine essays in Philosophy of History after Hayden White, plus a

previously unpublished essay by White himself, and a final Comment, in which

he makes a few concluding remarks. F.R. Ankersmit, in ‘A Plea for a Cognitivist

Approach to White’s Tropology’, treats the question of how White’s history of

tropes can represent a ‘contribution to human rationality’, arguing that though

Irony and Metonymy cannot constitute any cognitive relationship between

historical discourse and historical reality, Synecdoche and Metaphor may do so

– certainly something of a surprise for those of us who assumed that White’s

tropes automatically eliminated any conventional historian’s claim to rational

understanding.

Mieke Bal, in ‘Deliver us fromA-historicism, metahistory for non-historians’,

explains how White’s Metahistory offered a way out of the rigid formalism/

historicism binary into which she felt she and a number of her colleagues had

fallen at the time. This it did by showing that all history, philosophical or straight,

is inevitably structured and hence subject to formalist analysis, while formalism,

far from being ahistorical, is itself firmly rooted in time, specifically, in the way in

which the present frames the past.

Karyn Ball, in ‘Hayden White’s hope or the politics of prefiguration’, seeks to

reconcile the seeming transcendentalism ofWhite’s philosophy of history, i.e. the

‘precritical’ function of tropic prefiguration, with his ‘commitment to recapturing

the potential for visionary politics forsaken by a disenchanted historical

profession’ – no doubt a worthy aspiration, but hardly a very realistic one.

Arthur C. Danto, who was also taught by White’s teacher William

Bossenbrook, atWayne State University, contrasts his own view of the importance

of ‘narrative sentences’ with White’s view of the ‘rhetoric of narration’.

Nevertheless, both now, it seems, see historical understanding as an irreducible

fusion between past and present, against the illusion of a fixed but autonomous past

supposedly believed to exist by most conventional historians.

Harry Harootunian, also taught by Bossenbrook at Wayne University, in

‘Uneven temporalities/untimely pasts: Hayden White and the question of

temporal form’, tackles the notion of mixed temporalities – the idea that time is a

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cultural construct whose inherent heterogeneity is restrained and suppressed in

our culture in the modern era by the dominant historical narrative, which is

invariably an amalgam of nationalism and capitalism. By separating philosophy

from history, as Rankean empirical historiography had advocated, the problem of

time and its cultural specificity was safely banished to the realm of abstract

philosophising, with which academic historiography need not concern itself –

though it seems to me that the evolution of our language, containing concepts of

yesterday, today and tomorrow, before and after, sunset and sunrise, past and

future, and suchlike, may well preserve measures of time, even now of more

importance than the concepts of temporal uniformity and conceptual

standardisation that Harootunian associates with capitalism and academic

history.

Hans Kellner, a student of White, at the University of Rochester in the 1960s,

in ‘Hopeful monsters, or the unfulfilled figure in Hayden White’s conceptual

system’, weaves his reminiscences of White’s classes with a focus on White’s

concept of figuralism, observing how figuralism, although not explicitly

discussed in Metahistory, nevertheless informed White’s developing under-

standing of historical narrative. White moves, he remarks, from tropes to figures

to figuration via narrative. According to Kellner, the misuse of figuralism can

sometimes lead to a condemnation of past actors for failing to anticipate a future

that now appears inevitable. An ‘unfulfilled figure’ may be conceived as an

absolute refusal of meaning, as the noumenal reality of the thing-in- itself,

presentable only via the negative presentation of the sublime (in the Kantian –

Lyotardian sense). An example of an ‘unfulfilled figure’ is, according to Kellner,

the Holocaust – for those of us at least who are prepared to think of the Holocaust

as an ‘unfulfilled figure’!

Gabrielle Spiegel, in ‘Rhetorical theory/theoretical rhetoric: some ambiguities

in the reception of White’s work’, explores the various and often contradictory

ways in whichWhite’s thought has been interpreted, which she sees as due in large

measure to the rhetoric and sometimes ambiguous formulations that White uses to

articulate his ideas. Spiegel viewsWhite’s earlier work as equivocating between a

general rhetorical or semiotic theory and one that specifically applies to

historiography. For there is nothing in White’s tropology that limits it to history

per se, and yet White’s seeming refusal to embrace his theory’s generality opens

him up to the critique that his thought is not adequately elaborated. Specifically,

Spiegel wonders if White’s tropological theory of historical writing is

conventional (i.e. contingent, subject to cultural determination) or structural (i.

e. necessary, like a Kantian condition of possibility) since it often appears as if it

could fit either mould. As an example, Spiegel discusses White’s intervention in

the area of Holocaust studies.

Richard Vann, in ‘Hayden White and non-non histories’, explores White’s

encouragement of experimentation in history writing, both in an early essay, ‘The

Modernist Event’, and in a recent lecture, called ‘non-non histories’. Such

experimentation has become more radical, White believes, because recent

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philosophical theory, including his own, has lead to dissolution of the

conventional dichotomy of fact and fiction. Vann’s examples of novelised true

stories include Truman Capote’ In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s

Song and Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, all of which inhabit the

anonymous space between history and fiction.

Finally, Gianni Vattimo, in ‘From the problem of evil to hermeneutic

philosophy of history’, shows how White’s critique of the objectivist credo of

traditionalist empirical historiography, which presupposes a stable and immutable

historical reality, can be considered in the light of Heidegger’s cardinal idea of

‘ontological difference’, that is, Heidegger’s critique of Metaphysics as the

confusion of Beings with Being. What he concludes is that there is a distinct

similarity between Heidegger’s later idea of Being as happening or ‘event’ and

White’s conception of figuration: for the historical figura at once inherits,

transforms and interprets the past by choosing it in the present.

White’s own contribution to the collection, ‘History as Fulfilment’, is in

effect a useful account of the main trends in thinking that philosophy of history

(historical theory) has experienced in the second half of the twentieth century: the

structuralist revolution, the linguistic turn and various developments in the theory

of discourse in the 1980s. According to White, these developments led to a

complex and extensive re-examination of the relations obtaining between

narrative and other modes of construing reality. A significant outcome of this

re-examination was the turn of thought about processes to a consideration of the

modes of their articulation in time, and a collapse of the distinction between form

and content, a collapse that, by calling in question the distinction between history

and fiction (both the products of narrative), threatens the validity of form.

The conventional historian, White continues, believes that the past represents

itself in its remains – documentary, monumental and archaeological. It does not

have to be reconstructed, but merely revealed, not translated but merely

transcribed. This is because they believe that the objects of historical interest

have been self-constituted by the actions of past agents and agencies. History for

the conventional historian is then a matter, not of interpretation or explanation,

but of description; ‘inscription of the description in a written discourse that

displays the historicity of the objects described’ (41). In a narrative, on the other

hand, there are no rules of narration similar to the rules of evidence, supposedly

identified by the ‘community of historians’. The narrative requires that historical

agents, events, institutions and processes are not so much conceptualised as

enfigured (mise en figura), first as the kinds met with in stories, and second

(troped) as bearing relationships to one another of the sort met with within plot

structures of generic story types, such as epic, romance, tragedy, comedy and

farce. The endowment of these figures with plot functions endows the trajectory

of their life courses with plot-meaning. Plot-meaning is a way of construing

historical processes in the mode of a fulfilment of a fate or destiny considered, not

as an instance of mechanical or teleological causality, but as contingent on the

interplay of free-will (i.e. choice, motives, intentions), on the one hand, and

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historically specific limits imposed upon the exercise of this free-will, on the

other. The fulfilment here referred to signifies an enfoliation of all the

possibilities for action contained in the ‘situation’ the context enfigures as

the scene of possible action. The enfiguration of agents, agencies, actions, events

and scenes as elements of dramatic conflicts and their resolution (either as

victories or defeats) is the means by which narrative interpretations of historical

processes are constructed. Emplotment (mise en intrigue) is the means by which a

specific set of events, initially described as a sequence, is de-sequentiated and

revealed to be a structure of equivalencies – in which earlier events in the chain

are shown to be anticipations, precursors or prototypes of later, more fully

‘realised’ instantiations thereof (42).

White concludes his summary of development and change in historical theory

over the past half a century with an illuminating analysis of the recent Historiker

Streit (Historian’s Debate) in Germany. His conclusion is unambiguous:

Germany, the Soviet Union, the SecondWorldWar, the Gulag, the Holocaust, the

Final Solution, Hitler, Himmler and suchlike, which were once real things (what

is or was, one wonders, a ‘real’ thing?), events, persons, programmes, places and

peoples, can now only be represented in history as figures, verbal images,

simulacra of things that might be viewed and virtual things, things therefore that

admit of different notions of what they might have been or might have consisted

of in their formerly realised state. And such images and figurations (posing as

predications) are not governable by the logic of identity and non-contradiction,

but by the logic of narrative representation of the world – whether in its past or its

present, the logic of figures and tropes, which is not a logic at all, unless an

assemblance of images can be said to be a structure of meaning logical in kind.

White, it may be remarked, sees the practice of invention in history as a

product of the ‘fetishism of literalism’ that has burdened the historian’s profession

since it cut itself off from its tradition as a literary or discursive practice and began

to aspire to the status of a ‘science’ of the ‘concrete’ – a move that systematically

blinded historical studies to the fact of its own discursive nature, its status as a

practice of ‘composition’ and its irredeemably tropological method of constituting

its objects.

In his introduction to Philosophy of History After Hayden White, Doran

helpfully explains that White’s conception of figuralism derives ultimately from

the Christian hermeneutic tradition. A postulate of Biblical exegesis, it involves

seeing one event in the light of another, one event as prefiguring the other, from

the perspective of later events. Figural interpretation, that is to say, projects

backwards, treating earlier events as if they had been destined to be fulfilled in

later ones. Figural interpretation was thus a prototype of realistic historiography,

of a way of generating specifically historical meaning. According to Doran,

White calls this aesthetic and secularised analogue to the Christian figura figural

causation. In other words, it narrativises the existentialist/Christian figural

concept of projection. The generation of narrative meaning (emplotment) is

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simply a junction of the prefiguration – fulfilment dynamic codified in literary

devices.

Doran, wisely, I think, leaves it to White himself to comment on the

collection of articles gathered together in Philosophy of History After Hayden

White. This White does, in his Comment, in the most surprising way, remarking

that, while he appreciates Doran’s work in assembling this collection, he does not

think of himself as a philosopher of history – he sees himself rather as an

exponent of the discourse – analytic approach to the study of historiography.

Philosophy is about concepts, and history is about time and space-specific events

(I find this distinction between concept and history quite baffling: how, one

wonders, can one survey history, space and time without conceptualising them?).

Concepts are related to one another by the logical character of contrariety,

contradiction and implication. Events and things are related to one another by

cause and effect, by general affiliation.

There then follows a paragraph or two based, largely, it seems, on Michael

Oakeshott’s concepts of the historical past and the practical past (a commentary

that challenges, and quite possibly misunderstands Oakeshott’s clear distinction

between the historical and the practical past). A paragraph on the conventional

Western distinction between a present in which we live and have our being, a past

into which is deposited commemorative residue of the present existence and a

future that consists of the not-yet-present events bearing down upon us from out

there. The dead are the no longer present, and the living are the not yet dead. But

the relation between the past and the present, conceived as a relationship between

the dead and the living, can be ‘immediated’ by ‘history’ conceived as the

relation between past and present, which is both a disjunction and a conjunction.

A paragraph on time and the general failure of Western historians to make any

kind of transcultural and theoretically transcendent sense of it. Time does not

cause anything to happen, and such expressions as ‘the passage of time’ are

merely attempts to capture different experiences of change. And finally a

paragraph on the Darwinian model of ‘deep history’. A Darwinian model is not

appropriate as in history the relations between generations are not mapped by

genetic code but by genealogical affiliation.

White concludes his Comment on Philosophy of History After Hayden White

by warning of the dangers of the doctrine of ‘influence’ on history, and of the

dangers of thinking that one might provide a scenario for the future in the way

that one quite obviously can do for the past. The only ‘past’ that can be changed is

the ‘historical past’, which, according to Oakeshott (Oakeshott again), is only

accessible in history books. Whether the real past, the past made up of events that

are over and done with, events that cannot even be replicated, much less revised,

whether that past can be changed in any way is a moot point, because the only

access we have to such a past is as a past distilled into works of history. But the

past that we know only as it has been worked up, as a ‘historical past’ in history

books; that past can be revised because it is itself a complex web of nothing but

revisions.

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Thus ends White’s commentary on the essays contained in Philosophy of

History after Hayden White, a commentary that mentions only one of the essays

by title, that of Mieke Bal, on ‘Quoting Caravaggio’, and that all too briefly. This

was perhaps because he did not feel like commenting on subjects so abstruse, or

because he preferred to make use of the opportunity offered in the final Comment

to express some of his latest ideas.

What, one wonders, would the conventional historian (such as myself) think

of all this? Not much, perhaps. Though he might be intrigued by Ankersmit’s

conclusion that all knowledge is no less a work of art than art itself, and that in

historical writing, the historian has to pass through tropology in order to achieve

historical truth. By Mieke Bal’s account of photography as a medium of mentir-

faux (photographs of Joan of Arc); by Karyn Ball’s alternative (to that of

Ankersmit’s) map of White’s ‘Transcendental Narrativism’ and the politics it can

be said to generate; by Arthur Danto’s memoir of his time atWayne and Columbia

in the period just after the Second World War; by Harry Harootunian’s excursion

into untimeliness; by Hans Kellner’s generous account of White’s thought, as

displayed inMetahistory, and his other works; by Gabrielle Spiegel’s conclusion

that White should be placed among those ‘eschatological structuralists’ who

concentrate on the ways in which structures of consciousness actually conceal the

reality of the world; by Richard Vann’s wide-ranging account of the overlap

between fiction and history, a distinction best left to ‘publishers flogging their

books, librarians cataloguing them and bookstores arranging them’ (190) and by

Gianni Battimo’s surprising account of the insufficiency of the ontological

categories given to us by metaphysics. As I say, although the conventional

historian may be intrigued by these inherently interesting essays, I doubt if he

would conclude that they portray adequately ‘the philosophy of history after

HaydenWhite’ (whatever that might be). An alternative project might have been a

clear and well-worked out account of Hayden White’s thought and all its

implication for history. As for the mysteries of figuration, clearly central to

White’s thought, I expect that the conventional historian might be happy to admit

the importance of the concept but might wonder quite what is the advantage of

thinking of Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, the Holocaust, the Second World War and so

on, as figures, instead of as people, who once existed, and events, which once took

place. Also, he might wonder what advantage is to be gained in thinking of

figuration as an explanation of the relationship of events in history, as compared

with the more commonplace concept of cause and effect, in its non-scientific

sense at least.

Alexander Lyon Macfie

Independent scholar

Email: alexandermacfie@btinternet.com

q 2014 Alexander Lyon Macfie

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.918739

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