David Carr-Experience and History - Phenomenological Perspectives On The Historical World-Oxford University Press (2014) PDF

Experience and History

Phenomenological Perspectives
on the Historical World
D AV I D C A R R
1
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For Melissa, Eli, and Henry
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: On the Phenomenology of History 1

1. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL QUESTION 1
2. REPRESENTATION, MEMORY, EXPERIENCE 2
3. PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES: AN OUTLINE 5
I. The Varieties of Experience 8

1. ON THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE AND ITS CURIOUS FATE 8
2. EXPERIENCE AND INNOCENCE: THE EMPIRICISTS 10
3. EXPERIENCE IN KANT AND HEGEL 15
4. SO FAR: THREE CONCEPTS OF EXPERIENCE 18
5. DILTHEY, HUSSERL, AND A NEW WORD: ERLEBNIS 19
6. FROM MYSTICISM TO PRAGMATISM: BUBER, JAMES, DEWEY 23
7. TAKING STOCK AGAIN: HOW MANY CONCEPTS OF EXPERIENCE? 25
8. EXPERIENCE AND FOUNDATIONALISM 26
9. SUMMING UP: FOUR CONCEPTS OF EXPERIENCE 29
II. Experience and History 31

1. THE TWO RELEVANT SENSES OF EXPERIENCE 31
2. HUSSERL ON TEMPORALITY 33
3. TIME AND EXPERIENCE 36
4. INTENTIONALITY 38
5. OBJECTS, EVENTS, WORLD 42
6. OTHERS AND THE HUMAN WORLD 43
7. EXPERIENCE AND HISTORICITY 47
vii
8. BEING WITH OTHERS 48
9. “WE” AND THE COMMUNITY 49
10. COMMUNITY AND HISTORICITY 52
11. HISTORY AND RETROSPECTION 55
12. THE EXPERIENCE OF HISTORICAL EVENTS 58
13. LEVELS OF TEMPORALITY 60
14. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE EXAMPLES 62
III. Experience and the Philosophy of History 65

1. TAKING STOCK 65
2. EXPERIENCE, REPRESENTATION, AND MEMORY 67
3. NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION 67
4. EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY 71
5. WHAT KIND OF PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IS THIS? 74
6. THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF HISTORY 75
7. THE METAPHYSICS OF HISTORY 76
IV. The Metaphysics of History and Its Critics 78

1. THE PROJECT OF REREADING THE CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF HISTORY 78
2. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY:
THE STANDARD VIEW 80
3. HEGEL AND HIS ALLEGED PREDECESSORS 83
4. HEGEL’S LECTURES AND THEIR RECEPTION 91
5. 20TH-CENTURY REACTIONS 97
V. A Phenomenological Rereading of the Classical Philosophy

of History 105
1. DANTO AND THE “METAPHYSICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE” 105
2. NARRATIVE AND EVERYDAY LIFE 108
3. PRACTICAL NARRATIVE 113
4. NARRATIVE AND THE CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 114
5. NARRATIVE AND THE SOCIAL 116
6. THE PROJECT OF REREADING 121
7. MARX AND MARXISTS 122
8. HEGEL’S LECTURES AGAIN 124
9. PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 125
10. HEGEL AS REFORMER 130
11. HEGEL AND BEYOND 132
12. CONCLUSION 136
VI. Phenomenologists on History 141

1. THE EMERGENCE OF 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN HISTORICISM 142
2. HISTORICISM AND MARXISM 145
3. HUSSERL AND DILTHEY 146
4. HUSSERL’S RESPONSE TO HISTORICISM 147
5. HUSSERL’S CRISIS AND A DIFFERENT VIEW OF HISTORY 151
6. PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN THE CRISIS 153
7. PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF HISTORY 157
8. PHENOMENOLOGY AND HISTORICITY IN THE CRISIS 159
9. CODA: FRENCH PHENOMENOLOGY AND HISTORY 167
10. CONCLUSION 171
VII. Space, Time, and History 173

1. TIME ZONES: PHENOMENOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
ON CULTURAL TIME 173
a. Space and Place, Home and Beyond 173
b. Lived Space, Lived Time 175
c. The Universal Now 176
d. Time and the Other 178
e. Local Time, East and West 180
f. Conclusion: Cultural Time and the Contemporary World 182
2. PLACE AND TIME: ON THE INTERPLAY OF HISTORICAL POINTS
OF VIEW 183
a. Place 185
b. The Reality of Others 187
c. Time 188
d. “Virtual History” 191
e. Narrative 193
f. Conclusion 196
VIII. Experience, Narrative, and Historical Knowledge 199

1. HISTORY, FICTION, AND HUMAN TIME 200
a. Questioning the Distinction between History and Fiction 200
b. A Response 204
c. Fiction and Falsehood 205
d. Knowledge and Imagination 206
e. Narrative and Reality 207
f. An Example 209
g. Conclusion 211
2. NARRATIVE EXPLANATION 211
3. EPISTEMOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY OF NARRATIVE 223
Bibliography 233
Index 239
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The ideas presented here were developed and discussed in seminars at Emory
University and The New School for Social Research over a number of years. I am
grateful to the graduate students who participated. Smaranda Aldea and Jacob
Rump deserve special mention. Thanks are due to Dan Zahavi for help on this
particular project, and to Edward Casey and Richard Bernstein for many years of
friendship and support.
Parts of Chapters VII and VIII were previously published in the books and
journals listed below. They appear here with minor modifications of style and
content, and in one case as a translation from the French. I am grateful to the
editors and publishers concerned for their kind permission to reproduce
them here.
Chapter VII: “Time Zones: Phenomenological Reflections on Cultural
Time” in Space, Time and Culture, ed. D. Carr and Cheung Chan-Fai (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), pp. 3–13.
“Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical Points of View” in History
and Theory, Theme Issue 40 (“Agency after Postmodernism”), December 2001,
pp. 153–167.
Chapter VIII: “History, Fiction, and Human Time” in The Ethics of History,
ed. D. Carr, T. Flynn, and R. Makkreel (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2004), pp. 247–260.
“Narrative Explanation” appeared as “Narrative Explanation and its Malcon-
tents” in History and Theory, 47 (2008), pp. 19–30.
“Epistemology and Ontology of Narrative” appeared in French as “Épisté-
mologie et ontologie du récit,” in Paul Ricoeur: Les métamorphoses de la raison
herméneutique, ed. J. Greisch and R. Kearney (Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1991),
pp. 205–214.
xi
Introduction
On the Phenomenology of History
1. The Phenomenological Question

Phenomenology differs from its nearest neighbors among the philosophical dis-
ciplines, metaphysics and epistemology, by the kinds of questions it asks. Meta-
physics asks what exists, how it exists, and sometimes whether it exists (God,
nature, human beings, universals, etc.), and epistemology asks how we know
what exists. Phenomenology is more likely to ask, of anything that exists or may
exist, how it is given, how it enters our experience, and what our experience of it
is like.
So also with history. Rather than asking: What is history? Or: How do we
know history? a phenomenology of history inquires into history as a phenome-
non, and into the experience of the historical. How does history present itself to
us, how does it enter our lives, and what are the forms of experience in which it
does so? The purpose of this study is to outline a distinctively phenomenological
approach to history. History is usually associated with social existence and its
past, and so we shall be asking about the experience of the social world and of its
temporality. As we shall see, experience in this context connotes not just obser-
vation but also involvement and interaction. We experience history not just in
the social world around us but also in our own engagement with it.
Philosophers have asked both metaphysical and epistemological questions
about history, and some of the best-known philosophies of history have resulted
from this questioning. The phenomenological approach is different, but it is not
unrelated to these traditional philosophical questions, and later we will turn in
some detail to how phenomenology may connect to them. To begin, however,
I want to say something about recent work in the philosophy of history, in order
to show the need for a phenomenological approach.
1
2 experience and history
2. Representation, Memory, Experience

For several decades, philosophers’ reflections on history have been dominated
by two themes: representation and memory. Each is conceived as a relation to the
past: Representation can be of the past, and memory is by its nature of the past.
Sometimes these themes are treated together and sometimes separately. In
either case, philosophical reflection on these two themes has revealed some im-
portant things about history, but it has also raised certain problems that, if it re-
stricts itself to these themes, it is incapable of solving. As a way of overcoming
the weaknesses and solving the problems of this dual focus on representation
and memory, I propose a phenomenological approach which puts experience in
their place as the central focus of a philosophy of history.
Let us deal briefly with these two dominant themes in turn: First, represen-
tation. In the hands of philosophers, this has meant linguistic representation.
Though other forms of representation come to mind, e.g., pictorial, and though
memory itself, as we shall see, can be considered a representation of the past,
philosophers have trained their attention on language, and this partly for rea-
sons having to do with philosophy’s own history in the 20th century. First, the
philosophy of history is considered by most to be a branch of epistemology,
and the focus is thus on the knowledge we have of the past, which is thought to
be embodied in the writings of historians. This then fits neatly into the so-called
linguistic turn in philosophy, according to which the only way to talk about
knowledge is to talk about the language in which it is expressed. As has often
been remarked, the linguistic turn occurred at roughly the same time in both
the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions, though for different
reasons and largely independently of each other. In the philosophy of history,
however, these two traditions come together in the celebrated work of Hayden
White. White draws on Arthur Danto (1965), W. B. Gallie (1964), and Louis
Mink (1987), in the Anglophone tradition, but also on such continental fig-
ures as Roland Barthes (1966 and 1970) and Michel Foucault (1971). His ap-
proach is announced in the first pages of his influential magnum opus, Metahis-
tory (1973): “I will consider the historical work as what it most manifestly
is—that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse
that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the
interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (p. 2). The emphasis
on language as representation of the past has dominated the intense discussion
of the role of narrative in history that was unleashed by White’s work. When
Brian Fay, editor of the influential journal History and Theory, put together in
1998 a collection of important recent essays in the philosophy of history, he
introduced the whole collection under the rubric of “the linguistic turn and
beyond.”
Int roduc tion 3
Memory has served very differently as a focus for philosophical reflection on

history. As a psychological phenomenon memory seems only loosely related to
language—if it provides us an access to our past, it does not primarily, certainly
not exclusively, assume the form of a linguistic representation. But to be relevant
to history, memory has to be extended beyond its individual-psychological
sense, perhaps metaphorically, to become social. To be society’s memory, it has
to be considered collective, a notion first explored extensively by the great
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992). That is, it has to belong to or be
attributed to some social unit such as a community, a nation, or a people. The
idea of collective memory is so compelling that theorists have not hesitated to
appeal to it, sometimes without exploring the problems engendered by this
move from the individual to the social. Often explored extensively more by re-
flective historians than by philosophers (e.g., Pierre Nora’s ambitious Lieux de
Mémoire [1997] project in relation to France), this theme has hovered on the
borders between history, social psychology, and even psychoanalysis. In Halb-
wachs and Nora, and in the latter’s many collaborators, memory is often opposed
to academic history, which is thought to have contributed to the loss of collec-
tive memory as a source of identity with the past. The American historian
Gordon Wood cites Nora with approval (Wood 2011, 41f.) and quotes David
Lowenthal and Bernard Baylin, British and American respectively, expressing
similar sentiments. One philosopher who has taken this notion very seriously is
the late Paul Ricoeur, especially in one of his very last works, Memory, History,
Forgetting (2004). Interestingly, Ricoeur seems to abandon his earlier, represen-
tational and narrativist approach to history, in Time and Narrative (1984), in
favor of a concentration on memory. And on the whole this shift from individual
to social memory has been enormously fruitful. Features of memory that are fa-
miliar to us at the individual level are discerned at the social level, such as the
selectivity of memory, forgetfulness, repression, trauma and its effect on
memory, etc. Memory seems to provide a link to the past that history needs, and
takes up and uses in its work. History is often charged with the task of reviving
what has been forgotten, correcting what has been falsely remembered, strug-
gling against the tendency to repress what society would rather not remember,
etc. (See also le Goff 1992 and Huyssens 2003.)
Different as they are from each other, one thing these two approaches have in
common is that they begin with a gap between us and the past, between the pres-
ent which we inhabit and the past to which we turn in history. The problem of
how language represents the world is of course not limited to history; it has con-
sumed philosophers since the linguistic turn and long before. How indeed does
language represent anything? The peculiarity of historical language is not only
that the objects it represents are past rather than present, but also that they are
primarily people and actions and events, rather than things and their properties
(the traditional paradigm for representational theories of language). The pri-

mary linguistic form in which such things are represented is narrative, and narra-
tive is, or so Hayden White has argued at length (see White 1978 and 1987),
altogether different in form from the reality it purports to represent.
One does not have to be as skeptical as White to recognize the problem that
such representation poses: How to bridge the gap between the representation
and the represented? In an earlier work (Time, Narrative, and History, 1986)
I responded to this challenge by arguing that narrative and the “real world” of the
past, far from belonging to formally alien orders as White claims, share a com-
munity of form. In other words, I argued for the essentially narrative form of the
social existence and action that are represented in historical texts. In the present
work I have not discarded that view, but my emphasis is different. My focus is no
longer narrative, but experience. In my earlier work I argued, in effect, that expe-
rience itself has a quasi-narrative or proto-narrative form. But that focus may
have been too narrow. Experience is too broad to be encompassed by comparing
it to narrative form. While we shall come back to narrative at several places in the
following chapters, our underlying theme will be experience. And while my ear-
lier work was implicitly phenomenological, the present work, in keeping with
the focus on experience, is explicitly so. Apart from this, the present work ranges
far beyond the earlier one, devoting two substantial chapters (IV and V) to the
project of re-interpreting the “classical” or metaphysical tradition in the philoso-
phy of history, and then taking up issues in Chapters VI through VIII that derive
in part from re-assessing Time, Narrative, and History in light of its reception.
Only in the first part of Chapter V, and again in Chapter VIII, will narrative
occupy a central place in this study.
Memory, in its turn, while it seems to provide a link to the past, nevertheless
seems to presuppose a gap of its own. For it can be argued that in order to be
remembered, something must first be forgotten. Most of our words suggest this:
re-member, re-call, re-collect, and so on. Memory seems to consist in bringing
back something that has been lost. As we have seen, history is often portrayed as
an operation of salvage or retrieval against forgetfulness, of holding on to what
otherwise would be lost to the present. Societies or generations are reproached
for their obliviousness, for having no history, and warned that if they forget the
past they will be condemned to repeat it. Forgetting seems on this account to be
our most natural tendency, and history is seen as a constant struggle against this.
On both of these accounts, then, history is divided by a gap from what it seeks
to find or wants to know, and its activity is seen by philosophers as that of bridg-
ing this or these gaps. This constitutes the problem to which the philosophy of
history addresses itself: How does history bridge the gap, overcome the distance,
which separates it from its object, the past? It is in this way that the dual focus on
representation and memory has determined philosophical reflection on history.
Int roduc tion 5
It is against this background that a phenomenological approach, based on the

concept of experience, can be proposed as a means of solving this problem, or at
least addressing it in a way that takes us beyond the notion of a gap between
present and past that has played such a dominant role in recent philosophy of
history.
In proposing this approach to the philosophy of history I am joining hands
with a development that is already vigorously under way. In the work of F. R.
Ankersmit (2005) and Eelco Runia (2006), similar themes are being stressed.
Both authors express their doubts about the paradigm of representation and ob-
viously share with me and many others these days a certain irritation with the
longstanding dominance of the linguistic turn. In Ankersmit the concept of
“sublime historical experience,” in Runia that of “presence,” has served as the
focus for a new and refreshing approach to history. I shall be drawing gratefully
on these works, but my own approach is not merely derivative. I read these new
works with a certain shock of recognition, because they seemed to be undertak-
ing something I had myself been attempting in recent work under the title of a
phenomenology of history. This approach differs significantly from those of An-
kersmit and Runia, however, as I shall show. What follows, then, is a continua-
tion of that attempt in my own terms, in the hope that my efforts will comple-
ment and enrich that of my colleagues in what some (see Gethlein 2010) see as
something of a “new wave” in the philosophy of history.
3. Phenomenological Perspectives: An Outline

As my subtitle indicates, this study presents a variety of perspectives on the his-
torical world. The phenomenological perspectives that are developed in the fol-
lowing chapters are centered in and generated out of the concept of experience.
They examine experience broadly conceived, and historical experience in par-
ticular. They look at various philosophical approaches to history in light of the
phenomenology of historical experience. They draw on the work of Husserl and
other phenomenologists, and they engage the work of other philosophers of his-
tory. But their ultimate purpose is not exegetical. While they do not amount to a
full-fledged philosophy or even a complete phenomenology of history, they
offer the reader a broad survey of the aspects of history that can be better under-
stood by employing a phenomenological approach.
The term “experience” has had different meanings in the modern tradition,
meanings that sometimes overlap but are not always consistent or even congru-
ent. Chapter I offers a historical account of the “varieties of experience”—that is,
of the different senses this concept has acquired since the beginnings of British
empiricism. The purpose of this chapter is not to reduce these meanings to one,
but at least to arrive at a manageable array of senses that can be useful for our
phenomenological investigation.
Chapter II, “Experience and History,” launches that investigation by examin-
ing the temporal, intentional, worldly, and intersubjective features of experience.
It is these features that gradually reveal our experience of history and the histo-
ricity of experience. In this chapter we describe the experience of historical
events, the nature of the we-subject and the community, the role of retrospec-
tion in historical experience, and the idea of different levels of temporality—the
personal, the individual, the social, and the historical.
Chapter III, “Experience and the Philosophy of History,” contrasts the phe-
nomenology of history with other philosophical approaches, starting with those,
mentioned above, that emphasize representation (especially narrative represen-
tation) and memory. How is experience related to narrative and to memory, and
how does our focus on it provide us with a better understanding of these phe-
nomena? This discussion is then set in the broader context of traditional ap-
proaches to history, the epistemological and the metaphysical. The chapter ends
with a transition to the metaphysics of history, to which I turn in Chapter IV,
“The Metaphysics of History and its Critics.”
Sometimes called the “speculative” or “substantive” philosophy of history,
this tradition deals not with “history” as an inquiry or body of knowledge about
the past, but with the historical process itself. This approach is most often asso-
ciated with Hegel’s well-known lectures, given in the 1820s, but is often treated
as a larger tradition of questions and theories both before and after Hegel. In this
chapter I give an account of this tradition as it is usually conceived, and of the
strong reaction and criticism that led to its downfall in the 19th and 20th
centuries.
In Chapter V, I propose a “phenomenological re-reading” of this tradition
centered on the concept of experience and on a phenomenological conception
of narrative. I try to show that this tradition can best be understood not as meta-
physical speculation but as narrative in a practical sense, putting forth a story of
history focused on the present and future as much as the past. In this way I try to
account for the persistence of this approach to history even after it has been de-
clared defunct by most philosophers.
The remaining chapters contain a series of separate studies that complement
the studies that have gone before. Chapter VI, “Phenomenologists on History,”
deals with how members of the 20th-century phenomenological tradition have
confronted the phenomenon of history. Starting with Husserl, it examines the
relation of his early reflections on history to those of German historicist thought.
It then looks more closely at his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences. Finally,
it examines the views of history found in important representatives of the French
phenomenological tradition. Chapter VII, “Space, Time, and History,” returns to
Int roduc tion 7
a more direct phenomenological approach and takes up important themes that

figure in our experience of history. Space and time are treated not as abstract di-
mensions but as features of the lived experience of sociality and of the past.
Chapter VIII, “Experience, Narrative, and Historical Knowledge,” returns to
the topic of narrative, in its phenomenological interpretation: its epistemologi-
cal and ontological status, its relation to fictional narrative, and its role in histori-
cal explanation. Here I deal, perhaps more than elsewhere, with critics of the
phenomenological-narrative approach I advocate.
The studies that appear in this volume represent the culmination of many
years’ work on these topics, and some of the ideas presented here have appeared
in shorter articles and chapters. Chapters I through VI are appearing in this form
for the first time. Chapters VII and VIII, by contrast, contain versions of studies
that have been published before. One of these appears here for the first time in
English, and some revisions have been made to eliminate repetitions, topical ref-
erences, and stylistic incongruities.
I
The Varieties of Experience
1. On the Concept of Experience and Its Curious Fate

Appealing to experience will have a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the
history of philosophy. The call, usually expressed as a call back, to experience has
rung out at several key points in this history. One can see it in Aristotle’s reaction
to his mentor Plato, and thus as a founding motif of the entire Western t radition—
but I will confine myself here to the modern period. This call is issued typically
in opposition to the threat of too much distance between us and the world, the
truth, the others, reality—a distance created by too much emphasis on reason,
thought, abstraction; a distance that seems to leave us out of touch with what we
seek. Experience is called upon to re-establish a contact that has been lost. The
term “experience” is of course explicitly evoked in the initial proclamation of
British empiricism by John Locke, in opposition to the excesses of continental
rationalism. And the term returns to prominence in the American pragmatists’
rejection of the heady atmosphere of late 19th-century British and American
neo-Hegelian idealism. The term “Erfahrung” is central in Kant’s philosophy, and
it figures prominently in Hegel’s early reactions to Kant, as we shall see. And it
can be argued that something like the “return to experience” is part of the origi-
nal impulse behind Husserl’s phenomenology and the movement it spawned.
The motto often associated with Husserl’s phenomenology, “back to the things
themselves,” really means back to experience. In Hegel as in Husserl, interestingly,
“experience” and “phenomenology” are closely linked.
But by contrasting the appeal to experience with the focus on representation
and memory, I do not mean to suggest that this appeal is without its problems.
Anyone familiar with the history of modern philosophy knows that “experience”
has meant many, widely different things. So different are the various meanings of
this term that many are skeptical that a coherent meaning can be found and sus-
pect that the term even harbors an internal contradiction. There is evidence that
internal conflict in the application of this term led to the introduction in German
of the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis to deal with this disparity—a
point we shall return to later. But two terms may not be enough to accommodate
8
The Var ietie s o f Ex pe r i e nc e 9
the disparity. In a recent book called Songs of Experience, Martin Jay (2005) for-
swears attempting to find a unified meaning and turns his attention instead to
the question of why people ever thought there was one: “My intention is not to
provide yet another account of what ‘experience’ really is or what it might be, but
rather to understand why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have
felt compelled to do precisely that” (p. 1).
Partly as a result of this multiplicity of meanings, the term “experience,” so
important in Western philosophy prior to the mid-20th century, has more re-
cently fallen on hard times, to the point of almost disappearing entirely from
sophisticated philosophical vocabulary. The term’s vagueness may have been
partly responsible for the fabled linguistic turn, mentioned above. Talk about
language seemed capable of a great deal more clarity and precision than talk of
something as messy and ambiguous as experience. In the early stages of analytic
philosophy, language also seemed closer to formal logic, a subject which made
great progress in the early 20th century. Later, many analytic philosophers
mounted an attack on “foundationalism” in epistemology, and “experience,” at
least in one of its senses, had played a key role as the supposed foundation for
knowledge. We shall return in Section 8 to the relation between experience and
foundationalism.
There is a further problem with the concept of experience for our topic in
particular: “Experience” has meant many different things in philosophy, but one
thing all its meanings seem to have in common is the idea that experience is
rooted in the present. It is of the present, it is in the present, it opens us to the
present, maybe the future as well. But experience of the past? If there is any sense
to this, doesn’t it just mean memory? If history is truly about the past, if history
is the past, then experience seems excluded as a mode of access to it. Hence the
need for representation: We need to represent it because we can’t present it—that
is, we can’t experience it. Thus even if we can find a unified meaning in all the
senses of experience, it would seem to be unrelated to, or unhelpful for, an un-
derstanding of history.
In the face of all this skepticism I am nevertheless convinced that the concept
of experience can serve a useful function in philosophical inquiry and that it con-
stitutes an authentic motif for approaching certain problems, particularly in the
philosophy of history. My answer to Jay’s implicit query is that so many thinkers
pursued this meaning because they were on to something genuine and impor-
tant. I will try to show that the term’s notorious ambiguity can be reduced, if not
to a single meaning, then at least to a manageable array of meanings that point to
something real. As for the connection between experience and the present, that
will have to await the conclusion of the historical examination we propose. My
first project, then, before turning to the philosophy of history proper, is to under-
take a brief but detailed examination of experience. Naturally my account cannot
be exhaustive—this is one way in which my project differs from Jay’s—for the

term has been used, often quite loosely, by many thinkers for all kinds of pur-
poses. But for many key figures in the history of modern philosophy the term has
played a central role, and it is to these thinkers that I shall turn my attention.
It may be thought that a historical account of the uses of the term “experi-
ence” is at odds with the phenomenological “return to experience” that I pro-
pose to offer here. Doesn’t the phenomenological approach demand that we
turn directly to our experience and describe its essential structures, rather than
wasting out time exploring how our key term has been used? But my purpose in
this chapter is as much analytical and historical. My point is to derive from his-
torical examples a notion of experience that can serve as our focus in the phe-
nomenology of history. Language, including philosophical language, has its his-
tory, and we need to be aware of the history of some of the key terms we use. My
detour into the history of this term derives in part from my belief that the term
“experience” is used rather too loosely by phenomenologists, especially those
who write in English, and they (we) need to be aware of the hidden multiplicity
of meaning we bring with us when we use this important term.
2. Experience and Innocence: The Empiricists

Martin Jay (2005, p. 1) derives the appealing title of his book from that of a
poem cycle by William Blake, who published it in 1794 together with another
cycle called Songs of Innocence. This pair of titles gives us a clue right away of what
we are up against. When we encounter the opposition of experience and inno-
cence we understand immediately what it means. Yet when we look at the way
“experience” has been used in philosophy, especially and precisely in the British
philosophy of the 18th century, we find that it means something very much like
innocence, rather than its opposite.
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke (1979) begins by
attempting to reduce to absurdity the central idea of the rationalists, that of
innate ideas. But if the mind is not born with any ideas, “How comes it to be
furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store . . . Whence has it all the materials
of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From Experience.”
In his most famous metaphor, he supposes the mind to be, “as we say, white
Paper, void of all Characters” (p. 104). Experience takes the form, first, of sensa-
tion, from “external, sensible Objects,” and then reflection, from the operations
of our own minds.
Experience, then, as Locke understands it, provides our first, innocent en-
counter with the world. It may be thought that our supposed infantile and totally
blank minds are in fact our last and only state of innocence, and that our first
experience begins the long process of its loss. But this would be to overlook the
normative and hortatory function of concept of experience in British empiri-
cism. Already in the introduction to his essay, Locke introduces the tone of
caution and modesty that motivates his inquiry. He wants to “enquire into the
Original, Certainty and Extent of human knowledge,” including “the Grounds of
those Perswasions which are to be found amongst Men, so various, different,
and wholly contradictory; and yet asserted some where or other with such As-
surance and Confidence” (p. 44). By discovering the powers of the understand-
ing, and “how far they reach,” he may prevail on the mind of man “to be more
cautious in meddling with things exceeding its Comprehension; to stop, when it
is at the utmost Extent of its Tether” (p. 45).
Here we hear the tone of irritation, continued in the sarcasm of the attack on
innate ideas in the next chapter, directed against those who claim to know it all.
This theme of discovering the limits of human knowledge, and of deflating the
pretensions of those who ignore them, will be continued, as we shall see, in
Hume and Kant. Their work bespeaks a philosophical attitude that is a world
away from that of the early modern rationalists. And for all three, the cure for the
excesses of philosophy is to be found in the notion of experience. Here experi-
ence represents innocence in contrast to pretense, hypersophistication, needless
complication, abstraction. If we modestly adhere to what is provided by experi-
ence, we can avoid these excesses. In this sense the call (back) to experience is a
call for a return to innocence.
If we consider the primary features of experience, as the concept is used by
Locke and his successors, we can see how the sense of “innocence” is attached to
it, especially if we contrast these features with their opposites. Experience is
direct rather than indirect, immediate rather than mediated. Nothing roundabout,
then, no circuitous route to be traversed, no filter to be passed through or third
term to be negotiated; just a plain confrontation between me and the thing
(whatever it is), between the mind and its object. Experience is passive or recep-
tive rather than active; it provides us with the given (to invoke Kant’s later con-
trast) rather than the thought. It counters the danger, then, of the mind’s con-
structing something out of its own resources, or of the imagination’s conjuring
up some fantasy, that might obscure the thing or intervene between me and it,
that might substitute for the thing itself. Experience thus serves as the restraint
on the mind’s infatuation with its own abstractions, the wishful thinking that
allows it to see what it wants to see. Experience can perform this function be-
cause it belongs, at least in the first instance, to sense rather than intellect, and
sense is related directly, and causally, to the things it experiences. The tabula rasa
receives the stamp, or imprint, of things (Plato had already used the metaphor of
the wax tablet in the Theaetetus), which suggests that the guiding experience
here may not be vision, as is often claimed, but touch: the feel of something
impinging directly on the skin. As we said before, experience puts us directly in

touch with the world.
What strikes us here in the initial proclamation of empiricism is its decided
anti-intellectualism, its suspicion of the activity of the mind, whose salient fea-
ture seems to be its constant temptation to construct something illusory, and in
doing so to lose touch with the real world. The purpose of philosophy in this
tradition is not to enhance, but primarily to restrain, the intellect.
This motif is intensified in Hume’s work (1977). Like Locke he asks after the
origin of our ideas, and answers that they come from impressions, those percep-
tions distinguished by their “force and vivacity,” of which ideas are but the sec-
ondary, derived, and less vivid copies (p. 10). The term “impression,” which
Hume often uses interchangeably with “sensation” (p. 13), recalls Locke’s tabula
rasa, receiving the imprint of the outside world. But Hume has been chastened
by reading Berkeley and knows the pitfalls of trying to infer the external object
from the experience. The “universal and primary opinion of all men” that their
experiences link them to “an external universe, which depends not on our per-
ception,” can find no proof or demonstration, certainly not by the “very unex-
pected circuit” of Descartes’ appeal to the divine veracity; but it is also not sup-
ported by appeal to experience itself (p. 104). Causality is still involved in
Hume’s notion of impressions, but it is not that impressions are caused by the
outside world; it is merely that ideas are engendered by impressions. Both “per-
ceptions” belong entirely to the mind.
But this does not prevent empiricism from exercising its cautionary surveil-
lance of the intellect. No sooner has Hume introduced impressions as the origins
of ideas than he converts the derivation into a hortatory principle. It turns out
that it is “but too frequent” that philosophical terms are “employed without any
meaning or idea.” When we suspect that this is happening, “we need but enquire,
from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign
any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion” (p. 13). Thus suspicion of the pre-
tenses of philosophy turns out to be the motivating force, even more in Hume
than in Locke, for the enunciation of empiricist principles. Hume had already
warned us, in his discussion of “the different species of philosophy,” that much
metaphysics is “not properly a science; but arise[s] either from the fruitless ef-
forts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to
the human understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions” (p. 5).
We know, of course, what Hume has in mind here, and this sentiment takes
him a large step beyond the concerns of Locke. When popular superstition takes
over from the inadequacies of human understanding, the result is religion—or at
the very least the attempt by philosophers to shore up the doubts of the believer
by rational arguments. The theme of religious faith and its relation to reason was
at the center of early modern philosophy at least since Descartes, and will
continue to be so through Kant and Hegel. Reason and faith enter in, of course,
because there seems universal agreement that religion can receive no warrant
from experience. This will change later, as we shall see, but for the moment expe-
rience serves the philosophers’ interest in caution, modesty, and severe misgiv-
ings about exceeding human capacities.
Since English usage is an important factor in understanding these philoso-
phers, it is helpful to look at some of the OED’s (1971) entries on “experience.”
Sense three is closest to Locke’s “sensations” and Hume’s “impressions”: “the
actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge.” But
sense one is “the action of putting to the test; trial” (pp. 429–430). These two
senses come together in Locke and Hume: the claims of philosophy, religion, or
metaphysics are put to the test by requiring that they conform to the actual ob-
servations provided by sensations or impressions.
But an interesting and, for us, all-important terminological shift has occurred
in Hume’s work. In the Enquiry, as in the first pages of the Treatise, as we have
seen, Hume uses the terms “impressions,” and sometimes “sensations,” in con-
formity with Locke’s notion of experience. But Hume himself does not use the
term “experience” in this context at all. Instead, he introduces this term later in
answer to another question. After asserting that the relation of “Cause and
Effect” provides us with our only knowledge of “matters of fact” “beyond the evi-
dence of our memory and senses” (1977, p. 16), he then asks “how we arrive at
the knowledge of cause and effect.” He answers emphatically that “the knowl-
edge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but
arises entirely from experience” (p. 17). Now the opposition between “reason-
ings a priori” and “experience” might seem to conform to Locke’s use of the latter
term. But in fact, without telling us that he is doing so, Hume, whose mastery of
the English language is unsurpassed, is opting for a different sense of the term “ex-
perience” from that used by Locke.
We can see this in the continuation of the sentence we just quoted. Knowl-
edge of cause and effect “arises entirely from experience, when we find, that any
particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other” (p. 17). “Constant
conjunction,” which becomes the central theme of Hume’s analysis of causality
in what follows, is something we can “find,” not by a single, direct, and unmedi-
ated sense-impression, à la Locke’s sense of experience, but by a repeated expo-
sure to similar phenomena over time. Not only must we be aware of many phe-
nomena, and recognize their similarity, we must also hold the past instances of
these phenomena in our memory so that we can identify them with the present
case. In the Treatise (1965) he puts it this way:
The nature of experience is this. We remember to have had frequent

instances of the existence of one species of objects; and also remember,
that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended

them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession
with regard to them. (p. 87)
The temporality and complexity of experience in this sense, especially the

involvement of memory, are thus far removed from the experiences of sensa-
tion, in Locke, and the “impressions” of Hume himself. We seem far re-
moved, in other words, from the innocence to which we are enjoined to return
by Locke and Hume in order to curb the excesses of metaphysics and
theology.
But we are not far removed from an ordinary, English-language sense of
the term “experience.” This is the sense of experience that turns up when we
say “she is an experienced mechanic,” “he has learned from experience the
value of thrift,” etc. This is the kind of experience we lack as children and
gain as we grow older. It accumulates over time and gives us a strong sense of
what to expect and what to predict in the future. It derives from long-term
acquaintance, not only with the things and people around us but also with
our own capacities. In this sense we come to know ourselves, too, by
experience.
We have obviously now returned to Blake’s opposition between “experience”
and “innocence,” which, as we said, we can understand without any difficulty,
which accords perfectly well with a sense of “experience” familiar to any English
speaker. But it is important to recognize that this sense of experience differs radi-
cally from the one Locke uses to launch the empiricist movement, which is,
I would argue, equally part of ordinary usage and common sense. Locke’s “expe-
riences,” at least those of sensation, are characterized, as we saw, by simplicity,
immediacy, directness, and passivity. Hume’s “experience” is complex, mediated
by time, indirect because it must traverse the accumulation of the past, and active
at least in the sense that it involves the mind’s act of identifying past and present
instances. And it is not merely a matter of sensation, because it calls at the very
least on another faculty, that of memory. While this is the way Hume uses the
term “experience,” it is important to remember that he retains both the concept
and the role of “experience” in Locke’s sense, calling it however by the name of
“impression.”
The distinction that we have uncovered in Locke and Hume between these
two senses of the word “experience” raises many questions, most obviously that
of the relation between them. Is Hume’s “experience” made up or compounded
of “experiences” in Locke’s sense? We shall return to this and related questions.
For now it is important to note that two senses of experience play an important role
in the course of subsequent modern philosophy, sometimes more or less clearly
distinguished, sometimes confused.
3. Experience in Kant and Hegel

Hume was a major influence on Kant, as Kant tells us in many places, and one of
the most profound results of this influence was a prominence for the term “Er-
fahrung” that it had not had in the German- (and still partly Latin-) language
world of continental rationalism in which Kant was trained. There seems little
doubt that in many instances when he used this term, Kant thought he was using
it in the empiricist sense that he had acquired from reading translations of Locke
and Hume. As a result, Erfahrung has the same senses in his work that “experi-
ence” had accumulated by this time in English. But then Kant adds a third sense
that goes beyond both, and is more than just a combination of the two.
I have no intention of surveying the many uses of the term “Erfahrung” in
Kant’s work, but the main outlines can be sought out in a few key passages.
Consider this famous sentence, from the introduction to the second edition of
the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1956, p. B1): “There is no doubt whatsoever
that all our knowledge begins with experience [Erfahrung]; for how else should
our faculty of knowledge be awakened to action, if not by the objects that touch
our senses, and in part bring forth representations on their own, and in part set
our capacity for understanding in motion so as to compare, tie together and
separate these representations, and in this way to work up the raw material of
sense impressions into a knowledge of objects . . . ? . . . Though all our knowl-
edge begins with experience, however, it does not for that reason all arise from
experience.”
The echoes of both Locke and Hume are clear: In the first place Kant is agree-
ing with Locke that there are no innate ideas, in the sense of ideas before experi-
ence, and considers “experience” to mean the affection of the senses by external
objects so as to produce “representations.” (There is even something like the
Lockean “ideas of reflection” in those mental activities of comparing, tying to-
gether, and separating, which are “set in motion” by the causality of experience,
and applied to the “raw material” of sense.) And the latter, of course, are called by
the Humean name of “impressions” (Eindrücke), a term Kant employs many
times throughout the Critique. There is absolutely no doubt that the part of this
sentence that I quoted identifies “experience” with causally produced “sense
impressions.”
The use of “experience,” in the Humean sense of the accumulated observation
of like cases over an extended time, is harder to find in Kant, but a hint of it may
be found in this reference to Hume, also in the second edition: Since Hume did
not think the understanding could produce concepts, like causality, from its own
resources, he derived them from Erfahrung, “namely, from a subjective necessity
arising from frequent association in experience . . . that is, habit” (p. B127). Thus
Kant was fully aware that when Hume tried to found our understanding of
causality on “experience,” he had this extended sense in mind. But Kant believed
that experiences in the Lockean sense of sense-impressions could not be com-
bined over time, through association, without the aid of another faculty, the un-
derstanding, which was capable of the activities of “comparing, tying together,
and separating” mentioned in the earlier passage. In fact yet another faculty, that
of the imagination, seems also to be involved. One of the big differences between
Hume and Kant lies in the latter’s insistence on a plurality of mental faculties
that is not present or at least not made explicit in Hume. The “joining (conjunc-
tio) of a manifold [of sense] can never come to us through the senses” (p. B129).
Thus the unifying activity of the understanding must enter into a meaningful
sequence of sensations, and we have already left the realm of both Lockean and
Humean experience behind.
This opens the door to the third sense of Erfahrung in Kant, which becomes
the dominant one. It even emerges at the end of the passage quoted above about
all knowledge beginning with experience. Sensation produces impressions in us
and sets in motion the activity of the understanding to “work up the raw material
of sense impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience” (p.
B1, my emphasis). Thus the very same sentence contains two distinct senses of
the word Erfahrung. First, as we saw, it is identified with the impressions of the
senses, as in Locke; and second it is identified as the “knowledge of objects” that
results when the “raw material of sense impressions” is “worked up” (verarbeiten:
worked on or worked over) by the activity of the understanding. There can be no
doubt that two senses of Erfahrung are involved here, and that the sentence con-
tains an embarrassing and confusing ambiguity. “Sense impressions” by them-
selves do not constitute knowledge of objects for Kant. But if Erfahrung is the
knowledge of objects, then it makes no sense for Kant to say that not all knowl-
edge arises from Erfahrung, since then he would be denying that knowledge of
objects arises from knowledge of objects—which doesn’t make much sense, in
the context.
Thus Kant uses the empiricist, and specifically the Lockean, sense of “experi-
ence” to launch his account of knowledge and to attack empiricism as an account
of it. But then he uses the term “Erfahrung” to designate the “knowledge of ob-
jects” which results when passively given sense-impressions are “worked over”
by the spontaneous activity of the understanding. Between these first and third
senses of experience the second, specifically Humean sense of experience, seems
to be squeezed out of his account. Any temporally extended and cumulative
sense of experience would involve the activity of the understanding; but Kant’s
treatment of the understanding is so focused on the role of judgment and the
categories that time scarcely enters in. Even in the “schematism of the concepts
of the understanding” where the temporal predicates of objects and events are
correlated with categories, there is no sense of the cumulative sense of experience
described by Hume. Causality is disposed of in two sentences by referring to

temporal succession (p. A144/B183). The “I think” in Kant is indeed a unity
through time and change (both as inner sense and as unity of apperception), but
nothing changes about the I; nothing accumulates.
Thus in a certain sense experience loses its temporality as this third and domi-
nant Kantian notion of Erfahrung emerges. Something else is lost as well. Be-
cause of Kant’s stress on the “activity” and even “spontaneity” of the understand-
ing, experience has lost much (but not all) of the passivity associated with it in
empiricism. While the understanding depends on the given of sense to make its
empirical judgments true, and while the range or scope of the understanding is
limited by what it can possibly sense, Kant views the mind as primarily active,
legislating to nature, and laying down the conditions under which anything can
count as an object. In one way this is odd because the German word Erfahrung
strongly suggests passivity, even more than the English “experience.” In some
cases it suggests what happens to or befalls us, as opposed to what we do.
However, there is also a great gain over the empiricist notion in Kant’s con-
cept of Erfahrung: as “knowledge of objects” it places us in relation to the “real
world” around us and not merely to private sense-contents of our own minds, as
suggested in empiricist accounts.
But if the temporally extended and cumulative character of experience in
the Humean sense gets lost in Kant, it is found again in Hegel. His Phänome-
nologie des Geistes (1952) bears the subtitle Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des
Bewuβtseins. As Hegel uses the term “Erfahrung” it has almost nothing to do
with the empiricist (and Kantian) notion of sense-impressions. “Sense cer-
tainty” is discussed by Hegel, but only to be quickly surpassed in the develop-
ment of consciousness as a false attempt to ground itself on something solid
(pp. 86–87). In fact, Erfahrung in Hegel’s sense here is a long series of mostly
false starts through which consciousness slowly and painfully advances to an
awareness of itself. It is the pathway of doubt, “or more properly the pathway
of despair” (p. 67), in which consciousness repeatedly thinks it has hold of
reality “in itself ” (das Ansich), only to find that it has only an appearance.
“Phenomenology,” as the name implies, is the account of these (mere) appear-
ances, but it is also the account of consciousness’ constant dissatisfaction with
appearance and its drive to go beyond it. Consciousness bears within itself the
standard (Maβstab) for distinguishing between appearance and reality
(p. 71), so phenomenology has no need to impose standards of its own; it can
merely stand back and observe the process (p. 72). Phenomenology does
however provide a display (Darstellung) (p. 66) of the “sequence of shapes
which consciousness runs through on this pathway,” a “detailed story [Ge-
schichte] of the elevation [or education, Bildung] of consciousness itself into
science” (p. 67).
Hegel’s use of the term “Bildung” has led commentators to see the Phenome-
nology as a kind of Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative. Erfahrung is the
long process of maturation through temporal accumulation, trial and error,
learning from mistakes. This is very close to Hume’s sense of experience, but it
adds the negative element, the recurring role of mere appearance and error, that
Hegel calls the “dialectical movement” (p. 73). It is also to be noted that the
protagonist of this narrative has acquired a name not found in previous British
or French philosophy—though it is already important in Kant. “Consciousness”
(Bewuβtsein), called in its initial stages “natural consciousness,” is what goes
through or has this experience. In the long process of experience, however, this
protagonist will gradually change its name, first to “self-consciousness” and then,
finally, to Geist, its final destination and fully mature form, so that Hegel’s work
can in turn fulfill its own destiny and live up to its name, as a phenomenology,
not of consciousness, but of Geist.
4. So Far: Three Concepts of Experience

Let us take stock of this brief survey of the development of the concept of experi-
ence from Locke to Hegel. We can simplify our already simplified historical ac-
count by saying that three distinct concepts emerge as the primary senses of the
terms “experience” and “Erfahrung.”
The first is closely tied to the senses, and is thus passive, direct, and causal in
nature. To return to the terms suggested by Martin Jay’s borrowing from Blake,
this is experience as innocence. Some version of this concept of experience is
found in Locke, Hume, and Kant. The temporality of experience in this sense
does not on the whole come into play, or at least is not thought to be a signifi-
cant aspect of its nature. Presumably this sort of experience does take place in
time, but its temporality or temporal extension, at least in the sense of its
growth or change over time, is not part of the role that it plays in mental life.
Primarily connected with knowledge and with epistemology, experience in this
sense is thought to ground knowledge by connecting the mind directly to what
it knows.
The second concept of experience, found primarily in Hume and Hegel, puts
temporality at the center of significance. And this is temporality not just in the
sense of taking time or taking place over time, but in the sense of temporal ac-
cumulation and change or growth over time. This concept of experience is also
related to knowledge, but whereas a single sense-experience can ground some
knowledge-claims (I know it’s raining because I see it raining), extended exam-
ples of related cases observed over time are required for others—as in Hume’s
analysis of our knowledge of cause and effect. This is the sense of experience that
is opposed to innocence. Know-how, skill, savvy, and sometimes wisdom are as-
sociated with experience in this sense. It is hard to say whether experience in this
sense should be counted active or passive. Repeated exposure to certain phe-
nomena, like the behavior of billiard balls, in Hume’s example, can produce cer-
tain habits in us, which we both acquire and apply to new cases quite automati-
cally. Hegel’s account of experience as trial and error, by contrast, suggests
scientific inquiry and the activity of experimentation. Whereas passivity, as op-
posed to activity, is an important feature of experience in the first sense, what
counts about experience in this second sense is not whether it is active or
passive.
Kant’s “full-fledged” and eventually dominant concept of Erfahrung goes far
beyond the first concept by adding the contribution of the active or spontane-
ous faculty of understanding to the mix. This concept of Erfahrung should actu-
ally count as our third sense of the term that goes beyond the other two, and
which we shall henceforth mostly ignore. But this Kantian concept nevertheless
contains within itself this first “empiricist” sense of experience in a very impor-
tant role, that of limiting the pretensions or ambitions of knowledge. When
Kant talks of our knowledge being limited to experience or possible experience,
he is referring to the passive and direct—“intuitive” or “given” in his sense—
component provided by “sensibility.”
Part of the confusion surrounding the term “experience” is that none of these
philosophers ever clearly distinguishes the three concepts we have uncovered
here. That is precisely why it is necessary to undertake the present investigation.
But the distinction itself is clear enough. While these three main concepts of
experience are distinct from each other, they are also clearly related to each
other, although again, none of the authors we mentioned gives us a hint of what
that relation might be. The simplest way to express the relation between the first
two senses is to say that experience in the second sense is made up of experi-
ences in the first sense. Thus for Hume, an “impression” of billiard balls colliding
(an experience in the first sense), added to many impressions of the same kind
over time, produces the sort of experience (in the second sense) that can lead to
our idea of causal connection.
5. Dilthey, Husserl, and a New Word: Erlebnis

So far we have been speaking of the two nouns, in English and German, “experi-
ence” and “Erfahrung,” generally thought to translate each other. In the post-
Hegelian period of German philosophy, however, the German language already
had at its disposal two roughly synonymous verbs that can be translated as “to
experience:” erfahren, obviously the basis for Erfahrung, and erleben. Containing
as it does the root leben, to live, the latter term lends itself to the translation “to
live through.” H. G. Gadamer, who traces the use of this word back as far as
Goethe’s time, says that it conveys above all the “immediacy with which some-
thing real is grasped,” as opposed to what one knows through hearsay, inference,
or conjecture (Gadamer 1965, p. 57). Eventually the verb is substantivized as
Erlebnis (sometimes translated into English as “lived experience”) and is widely
used, along with the earlier standard term “Erfahrung,” by philosophers up to the
present day. So common is the use of the two terms in 20th-century philosophy
that Gadamer notes with surprise that the term “Erlebnis” itself did not come
into wide use until the 1870s, and that it is totally unknown in the 18th century
and even in Schiller and Goethe. According to Gadamer it is Wilhelm Dilthey
who, though he did not invent it, is primarily responsible for the prominence of
the new term. He gave it a key conceptual function in this thought, used it in the
title of a popular book (Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung), and elevated it to point
where it became a fashionable term and was even occasionally employed as an
untranslated foreign word in other European languages (p. 58).
It is easy to conjecture, though it is only conjecture, that the term “Erlebnis”
comes to the fore as a response to the ambiguity surrounding the term “Erfah-
rung.” Kant and Hegel were the most important philosophers in Dilthey’s
background, and it cannot have escaped him that these two philosophers
were using the term in radically different ways. The Hegelian sense of Erfah-
rung seems to have won out in Dilthey’s usage, and it turns up in such expres-
sions as Lebenserfahrung (life-experience), linked to such key terms as Lebens-
verlauf (the course of life) and Lebenszusammenhang (the coherence of life)
(Dilthey 1970, pp. 159ff.). The emphasis is on the long term and cumulative,
then, and Dilthey needs a word for the direct, immediate episodes of con-
sciousness in the short term. This is where Erlebnis comes in, and the term
plays a significant role in his account of human life. In many ways it seems to
correspond to our first sense of experience, the one closest to Locke, Hume,
and some uses of Kant.
Gadamer’s interpretation of Dilthey bears this out. Erlebnis, he writes, signi-
fies for Dilthey “the immediately given, which is the ultimate material for all
imaginative constructs” (Gadamer, p. 59). It is that which “precedes all interpre-
tation, construction [Verarbeitung] and mediation” (p. 57). It occupies the place
held by “sensation” in earlier (and some later) epistemologies, in the sense that it
is foundational and prior to and innocent of all conceptual mediation. Dilthey
shares with other epistemologists the idea of the Aufbau, that of an edifice of
knowledge, applied in his case not to the natural but to the human sciences. Here
Erlebnisse are the ultimate building-blocks of which the whole thing is con-
structed. Yet they are not meaningless imprints or causal impulses for Dilthey,
but ultimate units of meaning (Gadamer, p. 61).
This determines the unique relation they bear to the longer span of the life to
which they belong. “The course of a life [Lebensverlauf] consists of parts, of lived
experiences [Erlebnissen] that are inwardly connected with each other” (Dilthey
1970, p. 240). “It is only because life itself is a structural nexus [Strukturzusam-
menhang] in which lived experiences stand in experienceable relations that the
connectedness of life is given to us” (p. 241). The key idea of the connectedness
or coherence of life (Zusammenhang des Lebens) exemplifies the most important
relation in Dilthey’s thought: “the relation of whole and parts” (p. 241). Reflect-
ing on biography and autobiography, as the attempt to grasp the coherence of
the whole of a life, Dilthey compares life to a melody in relation to the notes that
make it up, or a sentence in relation to its component words (pp. 272, 290). As
much as the whole owes its meaning to the parts that make it up, the part derives
its meaning from the whole to which it belongs. We engage in individual experi-
ences which we take to be parts of longer-range plans, and these in turn are
vaguely grasped against the background of our life as a whole. Yet this whole is
not static, but is constantly subject to reshaping (Gestaltung, pp. 245, 292) as our
experiences and our plans change. Thus if Erlebnisse are building-blocks, they are
not detachable, not independent parts that could exist without the whole to
which they belong. Dilthey may want to consider them prior to conceptual me-
diation or explicit interpretation, but as meaningful units they are nevertheless
determined in their sense by the whole.
From these basic elements, Dilthey moves on to the activities of understand-
ing and interpreting experience, life, and its expressions that make up the human
sciences. It is here, of course, that he articulates the well-known principle and
problem of the hermeneutical circle: “we must form the whole from the parts,
and yet it is the whole that imparts meaning and that accordingly assigns the part
its place” (p. 324f.). It can easily be seen that this pattern of understanding, at the
theoretical or “scientific” level in the humanities, is just a replication on a higher
plane of the form of experience itself.
Another philosopher for whom the term “Erlebnis” is important, and who in-
sists on the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, is Edmund Husserl.
Though Husserl (1859–1938) was a generation younger than Dilthey (1833–
1911), the two interacted significantly in the last decade of Dilthey’s life. At the
explicit level, strangely enough, the younger man influenced the older: Dilthey
praises Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01) as offering an important meth-
odological foundations for his own work, whereas Husserl seems puzzled by this
praise coming from a philosopher about whose work he has significant reserva-
tions. But Husserl may have been subject to the unacknowledged influence of
Dilthey’s use of Erlebnis. In fact, he uses the term in a very similar way, though he
acknowledges that there is also a “popular” sense of Erlebnis that he wants to
avoid (Husserl 1968, p. 351). For Husserl Erlebnisse are real mental “episodes” or
“events” (Vorkommnisse, Ereignisse) which, “changing from moment to moment,

connected and interrelated in different ways, make up the internal unity of con-
sciousness of each psychic individual. In this sense perceptions, imaginative or
pictorial representations, acts of conceptual thought, conjectures or doubts, joys
and pains, hopes and fears, wishes and willings, just as they occur in our con-
sciousness, are Erlebnisse” (p. 347). He says that this is the sense used by “the
modern psychologist” and mentions Wilhelm Wundt by name, not Dilthey. But
it is clear that Husserl, like Dilthey, has in mind the simplest and most basic units
of consciousness when he uses Erlebnis, not the longer-term sweep of experience
in the Hegelian or Humean sense of Erfahrung.
Husserl’s notion of Erfahrung, on the other hand, does not quite fit into our
classification so far. It is certainly not the Hegelian–Humean sense at all. We can
understand it best by starting from Husserl’s Erlebnisse, and the list of examples
he gives of them above. These are first classified as intentional or non-intentional,
i.e., with respect to whether or not they refer essentially to an object, whether or
not they are of something. Pains, sensations, and certain other feelings, accord-
ing to Husserl, are Erlebnisse that are not intentional—that is, they do not have
an object: we just have them (pp. 391ff.). All the other items on the list are es-
sentially intentional: We perceive something, wish or hope for something, doubt,
enjoy, or fear something, and so on. These are then all intentionale Erlebnisse,
which Husserl also calls acts (Akte). Of these only perceptions (seeing, hearing,
touching, etc.) would count as Erfahrungen, in Husserl’s terminology. Thus all
Erfahrungen are Erlebnisse, but not all Erlebnisse are Erfahrungen. Husserl’s sense
of the latter is in fact closest to Kant’s second or “full-blown” notion of Erfahrung,
as it connects us not just with sensations but with objects in the world. At the
same time he would reject Kant’s notion that experience is somehow sensation
fitted into concepts, or concepts latched onto sensations; Husserl will insist (for
example in his late work Erfahrung und Urteil) that perceptual experience is
flowing and infused with sense, but at the same time pre-conceptual and pre-
judgmental. One of the best ways to think of Husserl’s phenomenology is to see
it as an attempt to find a terrain between Kant’s starting point of “blind” sensa-
tions and “empty” concepts, and the resulting false problem of how to bring
them into relation with each other.
The closeness of Husserl’s and Dilthey’s concepts of Erlebnis suggests that
Dilthey was right to see a deep affinity between their works, in spite of obvious
differences of temperament and style. They share not only the idea of what an
experience is but also their idea of its context and its relation to the whole to
which it belongs. Gadamer expresses this affinity well: “Just as Dilthey starts
with Erlebnis only in order to arrive at the concept of psychic coherence (Zusam-
menhang), so Husserl sees the unity of the stream of experience (Erlebnisstroms)
as prior and essentially necessary for the individuality of experiences (Erlebnisse).
The thematic investigation of the life of consciousness must overcome the initial
point of departure, the individual experience, [for Husserl] exactly as for Dil-
they. In this sense there is a genuine commonality between these two thinkers.
Both return to the concreteness of life” (Gadamer, p. 236).
6. From Mysticism to Pragmatism: Buber, James, Dewey

This holistic relation between the Erlebnis and the life of consciousness or stream
of experience as a whole, found in both Husserl and Dilthey, is of great impor-
tance, and we shall return to it shortly. In the interest of completeness, however,
we should pause to consider two other concepts of experience that made their
appearance in the early 20th century. Gadamer notes that the newly coined term
Erlebnis became “fashionable” and Husserl alludes to a “popular” notion of expe-
rience from which he wishes to distance himself. Thus the word took on a mean-
ing of its own apart from its more or less technical use by these two philosophers.
Gadamer notes its use to indicate a particularly intense, almost mystical sort of
experience, associated with the romantic reaction to “the cold rationalism of the
Enlightenment” and a “protest against modern industrial society.” He says that
the concept implies a connection to totality, to infinity, that is available to the
individual outside the bounds of reason and the understanding. At the begin-
ning of the 20th century the words Erleben and Erlebnis “became slogans with an
almost religious tone. The revolt of the Youth Movement against bourgeois Bil-
dung and its forms of life stood under this sign, the influence of Nietzsche and
Bergson took this direction,” as did the Stefan George circle, not to mention the
“seismographic finesse of Georg Simmel’s reaction to these developments” (Ga-
damer, p. 59). Martin Jay speaks of Martin Buber’s “cult of Erlebnis” in the years
leading up to World War I. According to Jay, Buber had already acquired the
concept of Erlebnis by studying in Berlin with both Dilthey and Simmel, but
then went on to associate it with the piety and mysticism of the Hasidic Jews of
Eastern Europe ( Jay, pp. 122ff.). Walter Benjamin later explicitly attacked Bu-
ber’s and similar valorizations of Erlebnis and urged a return to the sense of Er-
fahrung as building up gradually over time, of the sort he associated with the
“walker in the city” or flaneur (p. 334). For Benjamin as for Buber we somehow
were supposed to choose between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, and Benjamin and
Buber were on opposite sides. (See also Tengelyi 2004.)
This sense of Erlebnis is far indeed from Dilthey and Husserl, as it is from
most of the senses of experience that we have encountered so far, not only by its
mystical tone and religious direction, but also because it has become a valuative
concept—not the stuff of everyday life but an exceptional state of conscious-
ness that we strive to attain: a release from the everyday. In the English-speaking
world something similar occurred when William James started writing about
the Varieties of Religious Experience. James (2004) writes as a philosopher and
psychologist, but, as is well known, is in part drawing on his own religious sen-
sibilities and his family background in Swedenborgian pietism. In any case the
word “experience” is being used here in a sense that was rigorously denied it in
the British Empiricist tradition and in Kant, as well as in the neo-Kantian and
neo-positivist European philosophies of the day (see p. 39 and his remarks on
Kant, pp. 58–59). But James’ interest in experience, and his use of the term,
goes far beyond its relevance for religion, especially in his late works. The post-
humous collection Essays in Radical Empiricism includes the essay “A World of
Pure Experience.” Here and in other late essays James (1971) seems to be in
search of a primitive, unmediated union with the world, prior to any concep-
tual or linguistic divisions, prior even to the distinction between subject and
world. Here his work is closest to that of Henri Bergson’s notion of pure
duration.
Meanwhile a follower of James in the American pragmatist tradition, John
Dewey, accorded a central role to the word “experience” in his own thought. In
the hands of Dewey, in such works as Experience and Nature and Art as Experi-
ence, the emphasis is partly on the methodological character of experience, already
found in art and science, and now advocated for philosophy as well. Determined
to overcome the Cartesian opposition of subject and object, Dewey claims that
experience “is of as well as in nature” (Dewey 1958, p. 4a). It includes “what men
do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act
and are acted upon . . . in short, processes of experiencing” (p. 8). He opposes the
reduction of experience to knowledge “at the expense of objects of enjoyment
and trouble, friendship and human association, art and industry” (p. 32). What
he proposes is not so much a study of philosophy as “a study, by means of phi-
losophy, of life-experience.” An empirical philosophy is “a kind of intellectual
disrobing” where we attempt to “divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we
take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our time and place.” Of
course we can never fully carry off this “recovery of primitive naiveté.” But a “cul-
tivated naiveté,” an “artful innocence and simplicity” is, he says, attainable
(pp. 37f.).
And so we seem to have come full circle, with the return to experience as the
return to innocence! And yet it is easy to see that Dewey’s incredibly broad,
almost unmanageable concept of experience includes elements of much that we
have encountered so far. Clearly his concept shares certain features with Lebens-
philosophie, and is perhaps closest to what we have identified as the long-term,
cumulative, trial-and-error sense of experience found in Hume and Hegel. What
is certainly excluded is the Lockean notion of sense-impressions, certain aspects
of which survive in Hume and Kant. In fact Dewey explicitly opposes the
sense-data theory (see pp. 16f.). Likewise the Diltheyan–Husserlian notion of

Erlebnis is definitely not what Dewey has in mind, and his concept is closer to
that of Erfahrung, especially in the Hegelian sense. But Dewey would insist,
against the neo-Hegelianism that he knew quite well in its late 19th-century
form, that his is a naturalistic, not an idealistic philosophy.
7. Taking Stock Again: How Many Concepts of Experience?

In Section 4 we summarized our discussion of Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel by
saying that we had isolated two main concepts of experience: Sense one is exem-
plified by the largely passive sensations or sense-impressions in Locke, Hume,
and Kant, and sense two corresponds to Hume’s “experience” and Hegel’s Erfah-
rung. We also had to admit a third in Kant’s “full-blown” sense of Erfahrung,
which combined sensation and concept, passivity and activity. In the last two
sections we discussed several more philosophers, primarily Dilthey, Husserl,
Buber, James, and Dewey. How do their concepts of experience compare with
what we found before?
I think it is fair to say that the quasi-mystical, quasi-religious sense of Erlebnis
that Gadamer associates with the romantic reaction to rationalist modernity,
and that Jay describes as Buber’s “cult of Erlebnis,” together with what James de-
scribes as “religious experience,” stands apart from the other senses we have dis-
covered. It is not generally attributed a temporal spread and cumulative charac-
ter, but is more likely to be episodic and singular (see James 2004, p. 70, where
he speaks of the “brief duration” of religious experiences). Indeed it may involve
an experiential escape from the temporal altogether. It is also linked to feeling
and sentiment, and is thus perhaps related to the senses rather than the intellect.
To this extent it is closer to the empiricist notion (sense one) of experience; yet
its object, conceived as Totality, Infinity, or God, is completely unlike the narrow
focus mostly attributed to experience by the empiricists and by Kant. Indeed for
these latter thinkers, whatever the status of these transcendent objects, as Kant
would call them, they are not available to experience. Finally, as we have seen,
this notion of experience belongs in a normative scheme in which it is accorded
great value in contrast to other, more mundane types of experience. For all these
reasons I think we can call this a fourth sense of experience that needs to be kept
apart from the others.
But what of Dilthey, Husserl, and Dewey? We have already noted the similar-
ity between Dewey’s concept of experience and that (sense two) of Hume and
Hegel, in spite of his talk of a “return to innocence.” The same can be said of
Dilthey’s use of Erfahrung when he speaks of Lebenserfahrung in connection with
other important concepts like Lebensverlauf and Zusammenhang des Lebens. We
have also noted a Husserlian sense of Erfahrung which is very close to Kant’s
“full-fledged” sense of experience (sense three).
What of Erlebnis, then, as used by Dilthey and Husserl? We have noted that,
as Gadamer points out, there are many similarities between Dilthey’s use and
the empiricist concept based in sensation (sense one): Erlebnisse are immediate
and direct; they are episodic units with the flow of consciousness and to that
extent can be considered the building-blocks of an edifice of knowledge. Hus-
serl’s Erlebnisse share many of these features, though they figure in a much more
complex philosophy of mind that diverges from Dilthey’s, in part because it
wants to be more than just an epistemology of the human sciences.
8. Experience and Foundationalism

Without too much distortion, then, we can assimilate Dilthey’s and Husserl’s
Erlebnisse to sense one of experience. But there is a major qualification that must
be mentioned. One of the roles accorded to sense one of experience in the episte-
mologies of the empiricists and Kant is that of a foundation for knowledge. Sen-
sation in particular, as envisioned by Locke, Hume, and Kant, is a passively re-
ceived “impression” and as such, at least for Locke and Kant, constitutes a causal
link between us and the world. It provides the given with which our knowledge
begins and against which all our knowledge is measured. It is, in a word, what
can make our judgments about the world true. In this sense, experience sets up
severe limits to the scope of our knowledge and constrains what we can claim to
know about the world. In this role experience maintains its “innocence,” as we
saw, in the sense that it is uncontaminated by interpretation, conjecture, or bias;
and we can always return to it for verification of our knowledge-claims. In the
post-Humean Empiricist tradition extending up to the neo-positivists and the
logical Empiricists of the 1930s, “experience” continued to play this foundation-
alist role.
It is well known that, in this very same tradition, after World War II, this
notion of experience came in for severe criticism. Sellars (1963) attacked the
“myth of the given,” and for Quine (1980) this was one of the “two dogmas of
empiricism.” Epistemological “foundationalism” was severely criticized, and in
the philosophy of science the idea of pure observation, or observation sentences
that were not in some sense theory-laden, was called into question. Thomas
Kuhn’s influential work (1996) on theory-change in science contributed to this
view. The anti-foundationalist trend can be said to go hand in hand with the
“linguistic turn” in both the analytic and the continental traditions, since it is
language that is thought to get in the way of anything like pure experience and to
impose on it a conceptual framework. The metaphor of language games,
introduced by Wittgenstein (1964)–the idea of different games, of rules and

their application, of the interplay of languages games—which has been central
to the development of analytic philosophy since World War II, leaves no more
room for the idea of experiences in the empiricist sense. Thus there are few who
still wish to defend the foundational role for “experience” in this sense, though
the debate continues, especially in the social sciences, where post-empiricism
and post-foundationalism join hands with post-modernism and raise the specter
of relativism. (See Joan Scott 1991 and John McDowell [1994] in this regard.)
The idea of an extra-linguistic and hence extra-conceptual access to reality, pro-
viding a foundation for our theoretical claims, has fallen on hard times. And with
this one of the key roles for experience in sense one has been undermined.
It is odd that this battle was still being fought in the 20th century, since in a
way the foundational role of sensation had already been questioned by Hume
and Kant. For Hume both “impressions” (our sense one of experience) and long-
term, cumulative experience (sense two) only seem or pretend to provide foun-
dations for claims about the external world and about “necessary connection,”
i.e., causation, respectively. But in fact they do no such thing. We have already
noted that for Hume our experience can provide no ground for our natural belief
in the external world, and with regard to causality, all we have is the strong belief
that the future will be like the past, a belief which our past experience is never
enough to justify. But the positivists who so admired Hume did not subscribe to
his deep-rooted skepticism.
As for Kant, a certain skepticism animates his attack on traditional meta-
physics as well, and what he says about sensations or impressions is that they
can never ground or found our judgments about the empirical world. The ob-
jectivity of these judgments requires that they be subsumed under a priori con-
cepts or categories that come from the understanding, not from the world. And
the objectivity they do permit applies only to appearances, never to things-in-
themselves. Thus the late 20th-century attack on foundationalism has its ante-
cedents in the work of Hume and Kant.
One way of putting the result of this development is to say that certain experi-
ences we have do not provide the foundation or guarantee for knowledge that
philosophers traditionally claimed for them. But don’t we still have those experi-
ences? One of the results of the anti-foundationalist trend, and of the linguistic
turn in general, is that philosophers act as if these experiences—perceptual ex-
periences, for example—no longer exist or take place at all, or perhaps never
did—we only thought they did! Philosophers no longer want to talk about them,
preferring to talk about language, language use, the conceptual schemes that go
with it, etc., because that is where the focus of epistemology now lies.
And yet a case can be made that we still have the same experiences we always
did, which possess many of the characteristics ascribed to them under sense
one—simplicity, directness, passivity—experiences which seem to or, more

strongly, are felt as putting us in immediate touch with the real world around us.
One must remember that there are two related but different concerns that have
animated the treatment of “experience” in modern philosophy: One is tradi-
tional epistemology, concerned with the legitimacy and extent of our knowl-
edge; and the other is a theory of mind or consciousness, which seeks to map
and describe the different functions that make up our mental life. It can be
argued that philosophers have never completely separated these questions, and
that the concerns of one domain have affected the concerns of the other. The
present example is a case in point: Once the epistemological–foundational role
of experience in sense one was denied, this sort of experience vanished from the
map of the mind as if it had never been!
Returning now to Dilthey and Husserl and their concept of Erlebnis, it must
be said that both philosophers had little interest in the foundational role of expe-
rience and were focused instead on the theory of mind or consciousness. This
may seem a strange claim in view of the fact that both identified their enterprise
as epistemological. For Dilthey the idea of Erlebnisse as building-blocks in an
Aufbau of knowledge might seem to fit into the foundationalist scheme. But this
metaphor fits as well with the theory of mind as it does with the foundationalist
enterprise. Dilthey is interested more in how we arrive at the idea of the histori-
cal world, starting with Erlebnisse, than with the validity or objectivity of our
judgments about it. As for Husserl, the manner in which perceptual experiences
provide the intuitive “fulfillment” for perceptual judgments is of great interest to
him, but perceptual experiences are for him always “inadequate,” i.e., one-sided
and corrigible, and always predetermined by the intention they are meant to
fulfill. Especially after he introduces the “epoche” of the phenomenological re-
duction in 1913, the whole question of the existence of the “real world” is brack-
eted (Husserl 1950, pp. 57ff.). But Erlebnisse, perceptual and otherwise, as basic
elements in the makeup of conscious life, retain their importance from a non-
foundational perspective. He can still describe these experiences as carrying the
meaning of directness, of a felt contact with the real, and he can talk about how
the different senses corroborate each other in perceptual experience, without as
an epistemologist making the claim that they offer up certain and unassailable
foundations for our judgments about the world.
The distinction that I am employing here between epistemology and philoso-
phy of mind is admittedly my gloss on these developments and does not stem
from the philosophers themselves, Dilthey and Husserl included. In fact, like
many philosophers before and since, they did not clearly enough distinguish be-
tween the questions proper to each, and their terminology does not help. As
noted, Husserl describes phenomenology early on as a contribution to episte-
mology, and both he and Dilthey make liberal use of the terms “foundation,”
“grounding,” etc. Both are interested is questions of evidence, verification, and

objectivity. These are traditional epistemological concerns, and to the extent they
deal with them, they are still doing epistemology. But I am using the terms “epis-
temology” and “foundation” in the strict sense inherited from Descartes, i.e., the
project of “proving” the existence of the “external world” and providing unassail-
able validation of our scientific knowledge of it. Kant called it the “scandal of
philosophy” that the former had never been achieved. His readers have never
been convinced that he accomplished it himself, and the truth is that he contrib-
uted instead to undermining the validity of the very project. Heidegger said that
real scandal was that anyone ever thought of this as a problem and in this, in my
view, he expresses the implicit view of his predecessors Dilthey and Husserl.
It is true that a move away from foundationalist concerns and toward a de-
scriptive theory of mind can lead to important revisions in our account of expe-
rience. The classical empiricist notion of sensations, for example, is assailed by
Husserl as descriptively inaccurate and conceptually confused. The red of this
apple is a feature of the object in the world, not of my mind—which is neither
red nor any other color. The use of the causal/imprinting metaphor as a way of
somehow getting the external world into my consciousness is a case of distorting
the descriptive character of experience in order to save the foundationalist enter-
prise. Merleau-Ponty (1945, pp. 9ff.), following Husserl’s lead, carries this cri-
tique of empiricism even farther, arguing that “sense-data,” as they have been
used by empiricists, are theoretical constructs rather than anything we actually
experience. They are meant to explain, rather than describe, our experience, and
justify our knowledge. Thus the concerns of explanation and justification have
been confused with and contaminated the project of description. Yet both phi-
losophers want to hold on to some notion of sensation or sensing as a genuine
feature of experience. Sensation, according to these phenomenologists, while
sharply distinguished from the sense qualities or properties of objects, is a non-
intentional element or component (reel enthalten, in Husserl’s language) of the
intentional experience of sense-perception.
Sensation thus retains a role in the descriptive theory of mind, but in the phe-
nomenological tradition it has been decoupled from the foundationalist role it
played in the development of epistemology. And Erlebnisse, as understood by
Dilthey and Husserl, while it includes sensation, is a much broader class of
mental phenomena.
9. Summing Up: Four Concepts of Experience

Let us return to our main task, the attempt to reduce the multiplicity of senses of
“experience” to a manageable array. I have come up with four senses:
1. The “innocence” of Locke’s sensations, Hume’s impressions, and Kant’s first

sense of Erfahrung. To this we can add, without too much distortion, Erleb-
nisse in Dilthey and Husserl, provided they are decoupled from their founda-
tional role in epistemology.
2. The temporally extended and cumulative sense of experience found in
Hume, along with its negative and dialectical version in Hegel, and Dewey.
3. Kant’s second sense of Erfahrung, empirical knowledge of objects.
4. The mystical-religious sense of Erlebnis in Buber and “religious experience”
in James.
II
1. The Two Relevant Senses of Experience

So much, then, for our survey of different senses of experience in modern phi-
losophy. Our purpose, it will be recalled, was to reduce these many senses to a
manageable array, and to explore the usefulness of these concepts of experience
for the philosophy of history. Having accomplished the first of these tasks, I turn
now to the second. In order to do this, I propose now that we set aside the third
and fourth senses of experience, and focus our attention henceforth on sense one
and sense two.
In doing so I am taking a different path from another recent attempt to relate
history and experience, that of Frank Ankersmit (2005) in Sublime Historical
Experience. This fine work shares many of the same motivations which have led
me to the present undertaking. Ankersmit wants to revive the concept of experi-
ence as an antidote to the emphasis on representation in the philosophy of his-
tory, especially when representation is interpreted as linguistic representation.
He takes a radical view of the difference between language and experience, de-
claring them “mortal enemies” which permit of “no compromise” (p. 11). Like
me he forswears any foundational role for experience, going so far as to say that
experience “lives in a universe different from that of truth” (p. 231).
In the course of his book, however, the emerging importance of the term
“sublime” makes clear that Ankersmit’s sense of “experience” is actually closer to
the fourth sense that we introduced above. Discussing the difference between
Erfahrung and Erlebnis, he says the latter is closer to his meaning (p. 145), but it
soon becomes clear that he has in mind something very close to that heightened
intensity of feeling that Gadamer associates with the neo-romantic reaction to
modernity. A self-confessed romantic (p. 189), indeed, Ankersmit turns for ex-
amples to the poets (Goethe, Eichendorff) who glimpse the past through the
contemplation of the present. And he adduces historians (Burkhardt, Huizinga)
who find their inspiration in works of art and other aesthetic experiences. An-
kersmit uses “sublime” in the Kantian sense of that which escapes our reason’s
capacity to comprehend. His sense of experience is not so much mystical and
31
religious as aesthetic, but it likewise lifts us out of the everyday, in this case by
rendering the past vivid and alive to us. He is interested, he tells us, not in sense-
experience (p. 8), not in a state of innocence prior to historical writing, but in
the kind of experience that can come only after historical writing (p. 277).
Our own approach here is not incompatible with Ankersmit’s, and may even
be complementary to it, but it is nevertheless quite different. By looking to
experience as a way of “closing the gap” between us and the past, a gap left unac-
counted for by the emphasis on representation and memory, we seek a connec-
tion to the past that is prior to and independent of the historian’s interest and is
shared by all. Ankersmit’s approach seems to presuppose this interest and in a
sense to leave it unexplained. By seeking the sense of the past in everyday experi-
ence we may hope to account for why we should be interested (as the historian is
interested) in the past in the first place. It is true that we shall find an important
place for extraordinary experiences like those of the 2008 election, the fall of the
Berlin wall, and the attacks of Sept. 11. But our accounts of these experiences
will treat them not in terms of the historian’s interest in the past but rather as
experiences that lie outside the disciplinary concerns. In a sense, then, we are
looking for a “state of innocence prior to historical writing,” and the notion of
“innocence” has already figured in our account above. In the service of this in-
quiry, senses one and two of experience, as outlined above, will prove more fruit-
ful than the “sublime” experience treated by Ankersmit.
With regard to sense one, we have noted the problems connected with its puta-
tive foundational role in epistemology. Our claim, however, is that even shorn of
this role it retains an identifiable sense in the philosophy of mind. Incorporating
important aspects of the original empiricist sense of experience found in Locke,
Hume, and Kant, and following the insights of Dilthey and Husserl and their use
of Erlebnis, we can think of an experience in this sense as an ultimate and simple
unit of conscious life, an event or episode which is passive and direct, singular
and unmediated, even if it is still a unit of meaning rather than a material or
physical occurrence. Limiting ourselves in Husserl’s case to Erlebnisse of sense-
perception, we can say that such experience provides us with a “given,” not in the
foundational sense, certainly not incorrigible, but in the sense that it is felt as
putting us in direct touch with the here-and-now, the world around us and the
things in it. It is thus an intentional experience, not a “raw feel” or mere sensa-
tion. To experience or to have experience in this sense is to encounter directly
the things, persons, and events of our surroundings.
Sense two of experience, found primarily in Hume, Hegel, and Dewey, is long
term and cumulative, capable of identifying past experiences with present ones
so as to build up an acquaintance with patterns and what Hume calls “constant
conjunctions”—where “constant” really means “recurring” or “repeated.” Incor-
porating the Hegelian negative or dialectical aspect of experience into this sense,
Ex per ience and Histor y 33
it also involves error and appearance, but also the progressive aspect of casting
error aside and learning from one’s mistakes. This is the sense in which we de-
scribe someone as “experienced” in a particular domain: not only through re-
peated exposure but also through the accumulation of savvy or know-how in
that domain that comes from this exposure. We also sometimes speak of persons
as experienced in life itself, and this gives a certain advantage to the older-aged;
but people of the same age can be more or less experienced, depending, as we
often say, on how much has happened to them, especially of bad things, or how
much they have been through.
These are two very different and descriptively distinguishable kinds of expe-
riences, and we all have them. Do they have any relevance for the philosophy of
history? The case might seem to be hard to make. Let us consider again the tem-
porality of experience. Sense one seems entirely rooted in the present; if it is our
direct encounter with the things and events around us, it seems to be entirely in
the present and to link us to what is itself in the present. Sense two might seem
more promising, since it includes an implicit reference to past instances and thus
to the past. Yet in a sense it too is focused on the present, since it brings past in-
stances to bear on present experience. If there is a temptation to think of sense
two as simply sense one plus memory, then this temptation should be resisted as
overly simplistic. Sense two of experience does indeed involve a consciousness of
and reference to the past, but it bears little resemblance to memory as we usually
think of it. The key to the relevance of experience for the philosophy of history
lies in an understanding of how consciousness of the past, and consciousness in
and of the present, are related, and this is really the question of how the two
forms of experience are related. I will argue that while memory in the usual
sense involves a discontinuity with the present, the two senses of experience
allow us to see the continuity of past and present and the temporality of experi-
ence itself.
2. Husserl on Temporality
So far we have not spoken much of the temporality of experience, though it has
been implicit at every turn. Sense one of experience seems entirely rooted in the
present: If it is our direct encounter with things and events around us, it seems to
be entirely in the present and to link us to what is itself in the present. If the
second sense of experience is “cumulative” and “long term,” does that make it
just a sequential multiplicity of experiences in sense one, accumulating over
time? But, of course, a sequence of experiences is not the same as an experience
of sequence—or to put it another way, an accumulation of experiences is not the
same as an experience of accumulation. If the second, Humean/Hegelian sense
of experience is to come about, any present experience must involve an aware-

ness of the experiences that have passed. But isn’t this where memory comes in?
As we said, there is a strong temptation here to treat sense two of experience
simply as sense one plus memory.
These are the issues that Husserl grappled with in what he called the “phe-
nomenology of internal time-consciousness.” One of the things he shows, in his
lectures starting in 1905 (Husserl 1966), is that the notion of memory has been
vastly over-simplified by philosophers and must be treated with subtlety. His ac-
count, in spite of its complexity, strives to be concrete. Husserl recognizes that
we are not just conscious of time as such. It is the same as with space: We are
conscious of space by being conscious of things in space. Likewise, we are con-
scious of time by being conscious of things in time—that is, things that take time
or events. He considers the example of hearing a melody (pp. 23ff.). To hear the
melody, I must of course hear the notes, not all at once, but one at a time. As
I hear each note, does it suffice to say that I remember the notes that went before?
But I could remember notes from yesterday, or ten years ago. What needs to be
accounted for is the just-pastness of the previous note, its very previousness, in
virtue of which I hear the two notes as a succession. If “memory” means “con-
sciousness of something past,” then it is too broad for what Husserl has in mind
here, so he introduces “retention” to indicate the consciousness of the just-past.
This consciousness not only retains the just-past, but makes possible the con-
sciousness of the present as present: To hear the present tone sound is to be
aware of its taking place. But its taking place is precisely its taking the place of its
predecessor.
Husserl’s first great accomplishment is his introduction of the notion of reten-
tion and the sharp distinction he makes between it and memory in the usual
sense, which he calls “recollection” or sometimes “reproduction.” What Husserl
is trying to describe here is the experience of both the presentness of the present
and the continuity of the present. Retention is definitely a consciousness of
something past: The previous note is gone forever. Yet I am conscious of it
together with the present and it makes the present possible.
In his lectures Husserl compares the experience of time to the perception of
space, to which he devoted extensive phenomenological investigation during
this same period. To see a thing is to see it against a spatial background or “hori-
zon” which extends behind it and from which it stands out. In addition to this
“external horizon” the thing also has its “internal horizon”: Though I see it, the
thing presents itself to me one side at a time. These features find their parallels in
the experience of time. Just as I see the thing, but only one part at a time, so
I hear the melody—it is truly the object of my experience—but I hear it one
note at a time. This internal background is not just the retained previous tone,
but its retention as well, and so on back to the inception of the melody, which in
turn stands out from its external horizon—the silence, say, that preceded it. As
the perceived thing in space stands out upon a spatial field or background, so the
temporal thing is experienced against a temporal field or background.
This comparison of experienced space and experienced time is Husserl’s
second great accomplishment (p. 25). It can be easily seen that his description
instantiates Dilthey’s remarks about the interdependent relation of wholes and
parts. Dilthey, indeed, as we have seen, uses the experience of music and its “me-
lodic” character sometimes as example, sometimes as metaphor, for the flow of
time as we perceive it (Dilthey 1970, pp. 290f.). The individual note is nothing by
itself; it is heard as part of a melody. Even the melody, which begins and ends, is
nothing isolated, but stands out, like the thing I see, from its larger background.
And like the spatial background, the temporal one extends indefinitely into the
indistinct “distance.” These notions would later influence the Gestalt psycholo-
gists in their account of perception: Our experience is not a collection of indi-
vidual units or sensations; the figure-background is the simplest form in which we
can perceive. And for Husserl, and for later phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty,
time is also experienced in the Gestaltist sense of foreground and background.
Husserl’s important distinction between retention and recollection can be
understood in this context. In hearing the melody, the present note, together
with its retentional background, makes up our consciousness of the melody’s
sounding, its actual occurrence or happening. Consciousness of the present—
significantly, Husserl uses the Humean term “impression” here (Husserl 1966,
p. 29)—is not possible without its horizon- or background-consciousness of
retention.
By contrast, to recollect is to be conscious of an event that is not happening,
but did happen in the past. Retention and recollection are two radically different
ways of being conscious of the past. Recollections may come and go, but reten-
tion belongs to all experience. Retention is constitutive of the presence of my
object; in recollection I call to mind or render something present that is not, or
is no longer, actually present.
The biggest temptation and the biggest mistake in interpreting the difference
between retention and recollection is to think of it as the difference between
short-term memory and long-term memory. On this view they would be simply
quantitatively different versions of the same thing. But this totally misses the
point of the distinction Husserl wants to make. It may seem that the recollected
is “farther away” from the present than retention. Retention fades, past phases of
the melody recede from view, and then are revived or retrieved by recollection.
But it need not be so; even while the melody is sounding, especially in an ex-
tended piece, and the past phases are still held in retention, I can recollect one of
those phases and bring it explicitly to mind. In this case the recollected is drawn
from within the horizon of retention. Since the background of retention recedes
indefinitely into the past, there is a sense in which it is very long term, even if
parts of it are indistinct. Since anything recollected must first have been per-
ceived (or at least be thought to be perceived), in a certain sense every recollec-
tion comes from within, not from outside, the broader horizon of retention.
Husserl illustrates the difference between retention and recollection in an-
other way: Suppose I recollect a melody I heard yesterday. My recollection, of
course, takes place in the present. Its object, the melody, is not sounding now.
But if I recollect its unfolding, replay it in memory, as it were, then I have a recol-
lected present, a recollected retention, and so on. In other words, the whole
impression–retention structure, which makes up the original hearing of the
melody, would be reproduced in recollection (p. 46).
The phenomenological description of the temporality of experience is com-
plicated by the fact that expectation of the future is as much a part of the experi-
ence as is retention of the past. Husserl calls it protention and describes it as an
immediate horizonal anticipation, and he distinguishes this from the kind of ex-
plicit consciousness in which I might think about the future, plan it, dread it, look
forward to it, and the like (p. 39). Thus past and future are symmetrical: Reten-
tion of the past is different from recollection of the past; protention of the future
is different from explicit expectation or projection. The role of protention can
easily be seen if we return to the example of hearing the melody. If it is a familiar
melody, and the individual notes are heard as part of the melody as a whole,
future notes play as much of a role as past ones in constituting the sense of those
present. It makes no difference that the future has not yet happened, and may
turn out to be other than I expect. My anticipation, or protention, is still there. In
fact, what happens can surprise me, as it often does, only because it conflicts with
my anticipation. The element of surprise, of course, is often used in music, and it
is only possible because we build up expectations which are then disappointed.
3. Time and Experience

This brief exposition of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to time-
consciousness provides us with some conceptual tools for dealing with the con-
nection between our two notions of experience. Sense one of experience, which
has so far been described in terms of its directness, its passivity, its relation to its
object, is now seen in its concrete temporal relations to other such experiences
as a succession or a flow, and a retention of experiences that have gone before.
Husserl, like Dilthey, does think of Erlebnisse as the fundamental units of our
awareness that can be distinguished from one another; but they are temporal,
and their temporality consists not just in a simple succession but in a complex
flow with a retentional–protentional structure.
Every such experience is joined with an awareness of the past. But Husserl’s
account permits us to understand that we have an awareness of the past that is
not memory, at least not in the usual sense of recollection. In recollection we
turn away from the present and immerse ourselves in the past. Retention is
joined to the present, so intimately that it plays a role in constituting the very
sense of the present. It does so by forming the background against which the
present stands out.
Turning now to sense two of experience, does Husserl’s account permit a new
understanding of that? We have spoken of this sense, in contrast to the first sense,
as “temporally extended” and “cumulative” and a “process of trial and error.” This
is the experience we learn from, which contributes to our maturity and our abil-
ity to deal with the world around us. As we saw, in this sense of experience we
learn not only about the world but also about ourselves.
The first thing to be said about experience in this sense, in light of what
has been said about time-consciousness, it that it is, like the first sense of ex-
perience, centered in the present. Though there may seem to be “more of ” the
past included here, and though it may be complex in some ways not noted
before—recurring patterns, trial and error, accumulation—we think of the
past here as being brought to bear on the present. In other words, these fea-
tures of the past are important, not for their own sake, but for their influence
on our ongoing engagement with the world. Applying past cases to present
experience is also, by the way, an important characteristic of Aristotle’s phro-
nesis. If someone is “experienced” in this sense, say as a mechanic, the effect
is seen in skill and ability, in the sort of know-how that does not require ex-
plicitly consulting memory any more than it requires consulting instruction
manuals. This is why Hume emphasized “habit” as the way past experience
affects our present perception. Husserl, who was a great admirer of Hume,
likewise refers to the “habits” and “habitualities” (Husserl 1962a p. 100) that
are built up in the course of experience. For both, the future was also involved
in an important way. Past experience not only affects the ways we see and
understand things in the present, it also determines our expectations of what
is to come.
Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, then, provides us with a richer un-
derstanding of both senses of experience. More important, though, it permits us
to understand the relation between the two. On this account, sense one of experi-
ence, for all its immediacy and directness, is only possible against the extended,
retentional background which is experience in sense two. The two kinds of expe-
rience are not merely additive, not merely cumulative in the sense of an increas-
ing collection of individual units; rather, they are intimately connected and in-
terwoven. No Erlebnis is possible without its temporal “surroundings” of both
past and future.
We have drawn on Husserl’s account of time-consciousness as a way of

deepening our understanding of the two senses of experience that resulted from
our initial inquiry. Furthermore, the temporal description of consciousness per-
mits us to see how these two kinds of experience are joined. Though we have
spoken mostly of Husserl’s account, we have noted that it shares certain impor-
tant features with Dilthey’s approach to the same issues. Husserl’s account also
provides the backbone for the phenomenological tradition he founded, and its
main outlines can be found in important later thinkers, notably Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty. Accordingly, henceforth we shall speak more broadly of the phe-
nomenological account of time and temporality, even though Dilthey is for his-
torical reasons not usually included among the phenomenologists.
Consider Heidegger’s account of temporality. While Husserl spoke of the
temporality of Bewusstsein, for Heidegger in Being and Time (1957) it is the tem-
porality of Dasein. But the so-called care-structure of Dasein in Heidegger—
being-ahead-of-itself, already-being-in, being-with (p. 192)—corresponds to
the retentional–protentional structure of time-consciousness in Husserl. For
both thinkers, consciousness, Dasein, indeed experience, is not merely a flow, a
process, or a succession, but an event that spans time, the ever-repeated realiza-
tion of the unity of past, present, and future. Lived temporality is such that
through consciousness/Dasein, time is enacted. Heidegger calls this the “stretch-
ing” of Dasein and characterizes the “specific movement” of this self-stretching
as “das Geschehen of Dasein.” Geschehen, or the enactment of temporality, is the
word at the root of Geschichte, or history. “Exposing the structure of Geschehen,”
he writes, “means gaining an ontological understanding of Geschichtlichkeit—
historicity” (p. 375).
And so we arrive at history. The chapter of Being and Time from which these
passages are drawn is called “Temporality and Historicity” and in this chapter
Heidegger claims to have found the “existential origin of historical knowledge
[Historie] in the historicity of Dasein” (p. 392). Does this account of temporality
give us the connection between experience and history?
Unfortunately not. For historicity in Heidegger’s sense, based on his account
of temporality, still has no specific connection to history. The same is true of
Husserl’s account so far. All experience is temporal in this sense, including the
experience of nature. For the experience that is specific to history, we have to
look beyond temporality.
4. Intentionality
The use of a small-scale, compact example like hearing a melody is valuable be-
cause it permits us to focus on the main features that are new in Husserl’s
account, namely retention–protention and the temporal Gestalt. But Husserl

chose it partly because it allows him to ignore temporarily, for purposes of de-
tailed analysis, other elements that belong to the larger context of our experi-
ence. What is the context in which we hear a melody? The melody may emanate
from a violin, a singer, or an electronic player. In our discussion so far, it has been
isolated from its spatial context. Objects, actions, and events make up the larger
background in which hearing a melody is embedded. Though today the use of
earphones may seem to make possible a “pure” auditory experience, in fact even
this is part of our consciousness of our bodies and of the world around us. Our
experience is not in our heads but relates us to a world. Consciousness, as Hus-
serl famously recognized, is not wrapped up in itself, but is essentially of some-
thing. As Sartre would later insist, interpreting Husserl, consciousness is entirely
outside of itself, in the world (Sartre 1966 p. 13). The account so far is abstract
because it has left out what these phenomenologists call intentionality.
We encountered this concept already in our discussion of Erlebnis in Husserl.
As we saw, not all Erlebnisse for Husserl are, strictly speaking, intentional. Cer-
tain feelings, sensations, moods, even pains, are certainly experiences, but they
are not “of something;” we just have them, nothing more. But most, and certainly
the most important, experiences share the feature that, while we also have them,
they are “of something,” “directed to an object,” aimed, as it were, at something
besides or outside themselves. Even those non-intentional Erlebnisse are embed-
ded in an overall conscious structure that is essentially intentional in character.
Perception is perception of something, thinking is about something, memory is
of something remembered, love is of the beloved, desire of the desired, and so
on. For Husserl these instances of consciousness are essentially tied to their ob-
jects (Husserl 1968 p. 367). In the terms of our own discussion we would say
that experience is essentially experience of something.
Like the phenomenological account of temporality, the concept of intention-
ality remained central to the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Hus-
serl, even though it was modified and further developed at the hands of such
later thinkers as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. There are certain logical
or conceptual features of intentionality that need to be mentioned if the concept
is to be properly understood. As it has been described, it sounds like a simple
dyadic relation between the mind on the one side and some object on the other.
But in certain cases, such as imagination, fiction, illusion, expectation, the in-
tended object may not exist at all. And we would still say that the consciousness
involved was surely of that thing—a pink elephant, a white whale, a future
grandchild—and not something else. We cannot properly describe or identify
the intention without saying what it is of. As Husserl puts it, “in the essence of
every Erlebnis lies not only that, but also of what, it is a consciousness” (Husserl
1950, p. 80, my italics). Where the object does not exist, it would surely be
wrong to say that it had no object. So if a “relation” is defined as something that

has two existing terms, then intentionality is not a relation at all. Yet it certainly
relation-like, and this invites us to expand the meaning of “relation,” for want of
a better term, and use it, with caution, in speaking of intentionality.
Thus the objective existence of the object is not necessary for the intentional
relation to hold. But that doesn’t mean the object has “subjective” existence
either. The pink elephant doesn’t exist in my mind, whatever that would mean,
much less in my head or brain, or indeed anywhere at all. It is entirely fictitious.
The intention exists or occurs, but not the pink elephant. And if the existence of
the object is not a necessary condition, in a certain sense it is not sufficient either.
Even when the object does exist, we must distinguish, as Husserl says, between
the object which is intended, and the object as it is intended on any given occa-
sion (Husserl 1968, p. 400). The same star may be intended (seen, named) now
as the evening star, now as the morning star; the same man may be referred to as
the victor of Jena and the vanquished at Waterloo. According to Husserl inten-
tional objects are always intended somehow, as something. Intentionality is a
matter not just of relating to an object, but of bestowing a meaning on that
object. Thus intentionality turns out to be not a dyadic but a triadic “relation,”
involving the intention itself, the object (which may or may not exist), and its
meaning. In this sense, then, we must distinguish between the object and the
intentional object, but, as Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, p. 114) put it, “the inten-
tional object is not a special kind of object, but rather the answer to the question
of what a certain intentional state is about.”
The concept of intentionality, like the phenomenological approach to tempo-
rality, enriches considerably the account of experience we are trying to develop
here. But how does this concept map onto the history of the concept of experi-
ence we outlined earlier? The mind was always thought to refer beyond itself, to
relate to objects outside itself, to the “real world” or “objective world”—that is, to
a reality that is other than itself, that exists independently of the mind, that is
“there,” and is what it is, whether we experience it or not. That is, we might say,
the whole point of the mind. But modern philosophers turned this issue into a
problem: The mind seems to relate us to the outside world, but does it really do
this? Illusions, hallucinations, dreams, errors of other sorts raised doubts that
the mind could really do what it intends to do. The means used to solve this
problem—a combination of resemblance and causality—proved inadequate.
Experiences were thought to be caused by things in the real world, which pro-
duced “ideas” or images in our minds that resembled those things. This was sup-
posed to assure that our ideas informed us accurately about the real world. But
as our ideas seem in many cases to be caused by things that do not resemble
them—as in dreams, illusions, “secondary qualities,” and the like—and since we
are in principle not in a position to compare our ideas with the supposed real
world, the whole scheme collapses and we have failed to find a foundation for our
beliefs in the real world and for our assumption that our experience gives us
access to it.
We thus return to our discussion of foundationalism above and our assertion
that Husserl and Dilthey had lost interest in this problem long before it was fi-
nally given up in the empiricist/analytic tradition. Accepting the terms of the
traditional problem, and then failing to solve it, would lead to subjective ideal-
ism, skepticism, or even solipsism. It would be to say that the mind only seems to
be, but really is not, related to a world outside itself. But phenomenology, as the
name suggests, is preoccupied precisely with what seems. Far from solving, or
even trying to solve, this problem, the interest of Husserl and Dilthey shifted
from epistemology to a theory of mind. If their concern was still with a “theory
of knowledge,” then it was not that of epistemology in the traditional, founda-
tionalist sense. Another way to put it is that, instead of asking whether the mind
can really do what it intends to do, Husserl, Dilthey, and the later phenomenolo-
gists concentrated on describing what the mind intends and how it goes about
doing it. Their claim is that the mind, or consciousness, or human existence, in-
trinsically and essentially relates itself intentionally to objects outside itself, to
the world, to its other. That is what the concept of intentionality is all about.
Relating the concept of intentionality to the English term “experience” is a
complicated matter. This brings us back to the distinction between Erlebnis and
Erfahrung. An important part of the traditional English concept of “experience”
(that is, in our first sense) is that it purports to put me in direct contact with the
world, and that is an aspect of it that we want to hold onto, independently of all
foundationalist concerns. But of course many Erlebnisse do not purport to do
that at all. If I am eating ice cream on a hot day, my sense-experience puts me
directly in touch with something real: namely, the ice cream. But if I am longing,
yearning for an ice cream on a hot day, and can’t find one, here’s an intentional
experience directed at an object that doesn’t exist—at least not in my vicinity.
But I certainly experience my longing and yearning, perhaps quite intensely. In
doing so I know exactly what its object is, but I don’t experience the object itself,
the ice cream. Likewise, when I nostalgically recall a scene from my childhood, I
experience my remembering and my nostalgia, but I don’t experience the scene
itself—I only remember (recollect) it.
What emerges from this discussion is that sense one of the English word “ex-
perience” is best reserved for the here and now. The ice cream that I eat is here
and now. My yearning for ice cream is also here and now, though the ice cream
itself, as directly encountered (i.e., eaten), may lie somewhere in the future. Like-
wise my nostalgic recollection, of events long past, is here and now. This takes us
back to John Locke’s distinction between sensation and reflection. The first is
directed toward external objects, the second toward the “operations of our own
minds.” In this sense I experience all my intentions; but only some of these put
me in direct touch with the here and now. We want to limit our sense one to these
latter intentions. For these Husserl uses the term “Erfahrung,” and this sense
comes pretty close to Kant’s second, “full-fledged” sense of Erfahrung, which is
not of sensations, but of objects.
5. Objects, Events, World

The concept of experience which emerges from our discussion is one that has
been enriched by recognizing and describing its temporality and its intentional-
ity. Experience flows, and has its retentional–protentional structure. It is of the
here-and-now, the present, but only because the present stands out from a kind
of temporal field that encompasses past and future. And it is of the here-and-now
in the sense that it relates intentionally to objects that are other than and outside
itself.
The introduction of intentionality into the discussion of experience means
that we cannot properly speak of experience without discussing what is intended,
as it is intended. It is not just that we want to consider those “objects that are
other than and outside” the intention; we must consider them if we want to un-
derstand experience. The use of the term “objects,” however, is somewhat mis-
leading, since it is either too broad or too narrow. First it suggests particular
things, especially material things like my pencil, a sheet of paper, or my
computer—the typical adornments of the philosopher’s desk. “Object” can also
mean “anything that can be intended,” which is certainly too broad and too ab-
stract to be helpful for our purposes. So, what can be intended—that is, what
kinds of things turn up as the objects of one’s intentions, besides those familiar,
material things?
Husserl spoke of “temporal objects” (Zeitobjekte) (Husserl 1966, p. 22) as a
special class of objects—things that take time or unfold in time, and must do so
in order to be what they are, and to be experienced as what they are. The melody
is one example, but so is the dancer’s twirl, the tree’s sway in the breeze, a conver-
sation. But we have a perfectly good word to describe such “objects”: They are
events. Things that don’t take time, or just persist through time, like my pen, can
be distinguished from events. Of course, my experience, even of my pen, is itself
an event; that is, it unfolds in time, even if my pen just sits there. So, when we talk
of experiencing an event, like hearing a melody, we must distinguish between
the event of hearing and the event that is heard, the melody itself.
As we further develop our treatment of experience in relation to history, the
concept of event will assume major importance, and will have to be further
broken down and elaborated with some subtlety. For the moment suffice it to
say that the experience, of the here-and-now, is intentionally related to things

and events as its “objects,” in the broadest sense. But as intentional objects, things,
and events have meaning—and this leads us to the concept of world.
This is one of those terms that have developed a special sense in the context
of phenomenology, largely thanks to the work of Husserl and Heidegger.
“World” can mean just the totality of what is, the universe, all the things that
exist, and so on. The phenomenological understanding of world retains the
sense of totality, but includes the idea of things and events as intended—that is,
as having meaning; for consciousness, for someone, for human existence—
meanings they have in relation to one another and in relation to the totality itself.
Things and events added together may make up a universe, but things and events
that have meaning for someone make up a world, at least in the phenomenologi-
cal sense. This does not mean that these things and events, or their meanings, or
the world itself, are “merely subjective.” Indeed one of the meanings they have is,
as we have seen, that they are other than or outside experience. In virtue of inten-
tionality, experience relates itself to what is beyond itself. In this sense, it is in the
world, and the world, as a complex of meaningful things and events, is as essen-
tial to it as intentionality itself.
6. Others and the Human World

From the beginning, our examination of the various senses of the term “experi-
ence” has focused on the individual, and has had the character of a first-person
singular account. The prominence of the term in modern philosophy, beginning
with Locke, occurs in the wake of the first-person “revolution” inaugurated by
Descartes. Though most of his successors tried hard to break out of this mold,
they had only limited success. This individual, first-person focus seems espe-
cially to characterize the first two senses of “experience” that we have tried to
isolate and examine; the senses we have claimed are most important for a phi-
losophy of history. The phenomenological account of time seems similarly tied
to this first-person singular point of view. And yet this focus seems highly inap-
propriate for talking about history. History, it is fair to say, is not itself focused on
individuals, but concerns the social world. If we are to find a connection be-
tween experience and history, so that experience can overcome the “gap” alleg-
edly involved in representation and memory, then experience is in some sense
going to have to concern more than just the individual. We are going to have to
talk about the experience of the social world, and, at the limit, about experience
itself as something that occurs socially.
A significant part of what we experience, among the things and events that
make up our world, are (1) other people and groups of other people; (2) events
involving other people; (3) the actions, sufferings, and experiences of other
people; (4) human artifacts and other productions, not only physical but also
institutional, procedural, and developmental. The concept of experience in
modern philosophy came to prominence, as we have seen, in response to episte-
mological concerns, and these were conceived in relation to the newly develop-
ing sciences of nature. The only objects of experience that were considered im-
portant, accordingly, were physical and natural objects. This focus on things
meant that our encounter with other people was conceived in terms of our per-
ception of their bodies as physical objects and led to the notorious problem of
“other minds.”
This supposed problem, certainly insoluble as it is formulated, has long been
recognized as bogus. We experience persons as persons, their bodies as human
bodies, not as physical objects. But the abstractness of this problem goes far
beyond that. Consider the objects that Hume adduces in his discussion of our
knowledge of cause and effect: the “letter from a friend” and the celebrated bil-
liard balls (Hume 1977, pp. 16, 18). Both are human artifacts that are not en-
countered as such in nature but come with social meanings attached. Each is
experienced as what it is, in other words, thanks to a social context in which let-
ters are written and sent and billiard games are played.
Thus our world is primarily, indeed overwhelmingly, a human and social
world. It may be objected that it is inappropriate to speak of the experience of this
human world, as if it were somehow directly given. Isn’t the experience of the
human world always influenced and pervaded by the results of theoretical work,
in the form of unconsciously applied concepts, ideological assumptions, and the
like? Does this experience not always presuppose a conceptual framework which
shapes the social world for the experiencer? Certainly. But the same can be said
of the experience of the material world. Unconscious assumptions can also influ-
ence, guide, and color such experience. But our purpose here is not to explain
experience psychologically, to trace its content back to some hidden, uncon-
scious origins. Our guiding assumption is that we can distinguish descriptively
between theoretical or conceptual activity on the one hand and extra-scientific
experience on the other. Neither the explanation nor for that matter the truth-
content of this experience is of interest to us. For phenomenology both of these
issues are, as Husserl said, bracketed. (See Ankersmit 2005, p. 231.)
So far we have distinguished between the experience of the social world and
that of the natural world. But it must be noted that human events occur against
the backdrop of the natural world. Thus nature plays an important—though
secondary—role here as the location and theater of human events. In this sense
nature belongs to the human world. But this sense of nature is somewhat differ-
ent from that of directly experienced nature, since it gets its meaning from the
actions and experiences of individuals and social groups. A landscape can be
directly experienced, but it can also be understood as the specific environment

of some community and the source of its nourishment and building materials.
Its geographical features influence the development of settlements and towns.
Here the landscape is given indirectly to our experience, namely by way of the
interests and activities of this particular group.
Once this human world moves to the center of our concern, and becomes
more fully elaborated, we can reconsider the temporality of experience in relation
to the social world and to social existence. Let us return to the melody, not as an
abstract example of a temporal object, as in Husserl’s phenomenology of time-
consciousness, but as a concrete result of human activity. The activity I refer to
here is not that of the composer, but that of the player or singer who brings the
melody into the world as an acoustical phenomenon. Singing and playing are
actions that unfold in time and consist of a series of sub-actions and phases. This
series has meaning not merely for the hearer, who experiences it, but also for the
performer who produces it. And the latter meaning can be quite different from
the former. With respect to the future, the content of protention will be different
for the performer who produces it and the hearer who passively experiences it.
Furthermore, the performance of music is a social process which can occur in
different social contexts, from street music to jazz improvisation to concert hall.
We can now shift our attention from the activity of making music to the music
itself as a product belonging to the inventory of our cultural environment. We
and our contemporaries live in a world that includes, besides music, also litera-
ture and art, pop culture, the financial system, businesses, trends, movements,
etc. But the material inventory of our cultural world is much nearer to us and
more pervasive. Most of us live in a world of houses and buildings, of streets,
traffic, and means of transportation. Houses and streets provide the surround-
ings for the movements and actions of those who live in and use them. As arti-
facts, they also refer implicitly to the activity of their builders. The human world
is thus a world not just of things but of events and processes, of actions and de-
velopments, which we experience as continuities thanks to the retentional–
protentional structure. Like the natural world the human world is temporal, and
we experience it as temporal continuity, but the temporality of the human world
is different from that of the natural world.
Houses and streets, cities and their configurations, have a past which is given
with them as horizon and background when we experience them in the present.
Though they rise and fall, and their contours and skylines sometimes vary even
within our experience, their change is on a different time-scale than the human
events that take place within and around them. This allows them to form a more
or less stable background for the doings of their inhabitants. We count on them
in this way, and their sudden destruction, through the bombings of war or terror-
ism, or even through the wrecker’s ball, is a wrenching and disorienting
experience in its own right, quite apart from whatever injury or loss of life may
be involved. Those of us who walk the streets of cities feel the permanence and
massiveness, fragile as it ultimately is, of surrounding buildings, streets, and
neighborhoods that were there long before we were; Runia (2006, p. 12), com-
menting on the work of W. G. Sebald, writes: “Walking is: meeting a landscape
on its own terms (and so making it your own), as well as conquering it step-by-
step with your whole body (and so experiencing it as it is).” As artifacts, build-
ings are always designed for some purpose, but over the course of time they can
also be diverted to other purposes, as the people who use them change their
projects and their needs.
We feel this clearly when we walk through the ruins of ancient and restored
cities. The streets, paths, doors, and enclosed spaces may be full of tourists, but
they are empty of what gave them their origins, namely the people who pursued
their interests and projects, sought shelter in the protection of home and family,
and assembled for public gatherings. The existence of archeological sites and res-
torations, the very idea of wanting to know how people lived in the past, derives
from the historical consciousness of recent times. But one of its unexpected ben-
efits, not noticed by most of those who look on in fascination today, is what
these experiences can tell us about own (as yet) non-ruined and (not yet) ar-
cheologically excavated cities and buildings. Trying to imagine the Roman,
Greek, or Cambodian inhabitants of these splendid ruins can lead us to see our
own living and working cities as if we were historians and archeologists. This
kind of distancing is nothing other than the phenomenological reduction Hus-
serl practiced, allowing us to see for the first time something that is otherwise
too close for us to observe.
The horizon of pastness is given in retention, and thanks to retention we have,
as we said before, something like an experience of the past—but only as back-
ground for the present. Further, we can say that many of these objects, and many
of these people, are older than we are—i.e., older than I, the particular subject of
any given experience. In these cases the horizon of pastness reaches back to the
time before our birth. Thus the depth and breadth of this past, receding into the
indefinite, as horizon and background for the present, is always given in every
experience of the human world. In this sense what is experienced is not limited
to the lifetime of the experiencer.
Merging the phenomenological account of temporality with this description
of the social world, we can thus say that the direct experience (sense one) of per-
sons, groups, and other social entities, such as artifacts, buildings, streets, etc.,
bears its past along with it in the manner of retentional consciousness. To have
an experience in this first sense is to be in the presence of an object that stands
out from its temporal background. To experience an action or event is likewise
to see it emerge from its antecedents. In each of these cases the retained past is
part of what gives meaning to the present and makes it what it is. Each object and
event, in other words, comes to us with its past attached. Without this past it
would not only be meaningless, it could not even be an item in our experience. If
it is true that our experience is in the present and connects us with the present,
it is equally true that it comprises an unmediated connection with the past.
This past extends indefinitely into the temporal “distance” and has its con-
tours and features, some more distinct than others. This is where experience in
sense two comes in, since the retained past has patterns that accumulate and bear
upon the present. One way of stating this is to say that what is given in the im-
mediate and direct experience of sense one can make sense or have meaning for
us only in virtue of falling into a pattern or structure made possible by sense two.
It is recognized as an exemplar or instance of a type provided by our past experi-
ence. As we’ve seen, and as Hume pointed out, we build up expectations. Yet
because sense one is also open to the future, those expectations can be rudely
disappointed, or happily surprised, by the new and the unexpected.
7. Experience and Historicity

Our account of experience so far, heavily influenced by phenomenology and its
concepts of temporality, intentionality, and the human world, leads in the direc-
tion of history by way of the concept of historicity. This is a term that has been
used in the works of Husserl, Dilthey, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur.
The concept indicates an approach to history that differs from traditional philo-
sophical inquiries. Again we can make the contrast with the metaphysical and
epistemological approaches. The question is not: What is history? or How do we
know history? but rather: What is it to be historical? What is it like to exist his-
torically? What does it mean to be historical? Dilthey wrote that “we are histori-
cal beings first, before we are observers [Betrachter] of history, and only because
we are the former do we become the latter . . . The historical world is always
there, and the individual not only observes it from the outside but is intertwined
with it [in sie verwebt]” (Dilthey 1970, p. 346). What we want to know is what it
means to be a “historical being,” in Dilthey’s sense, and in what sense we are in-
tertwined with history. We want to know how history is encountered, how it
enters our lives, and in what forms of consciousness and experience it does so.
The idea of historicity suggests that we all are historical beings, not inciden-
tally but in some important way, just as we are temporal, spatial, bodily, con-
scious, social, etc. Thus the word “historical” is not used as it is when we say that
Bismarck was a historical individual, since in that sense most of us are not histori-
cal. Nor as it is used when we say that the storming of the Bastille was a historical
event, since most events are not historical in that sense.
8. Being with Others

Our description so far of others and the human world might suggest that the
discussion of my relations with others would start with how the I confronts the
Thou. Traditional accounts, phenomenological and otherwise, of the social
aspect of human existence have taken their start from the situation in which I
experience the other face to face. They have asked questions about how the
Other can be an object for me which is nevertheless a subject, how I can know
the Other’s thoughts and experiences when all I perceive is the body, and more
generally how I relate and have access to a subjectivity which is not my own.
These are perfectly legitimate questions, as long as they are divorced from the
old foundationalist problem of “other minds,” and they are especially important
if one wants to consider also the ethical dimension of intersubjectivity. These
questions lie behind the classic formulation of the I–Thou relation in Martin
Buber (1958); and even Levinas (1969), who is critical of many aspects of this
whole approach, arguably still takes it as his point of departure. But it should be
recognized that this approach concerns only one mode of being with and relat-
ing to others.
Husserl and Heidegger actually took a different approach to being with
others, and this approach was integrated into their concepts of historicity. Hei-
degger begins with the everyday, precognitive, practical world, and this world is
social through and through. But here we encounter others first and foremost not
as objects to be known but through common projects in which we are engaged.
The others are experienced as co-workers and co-participants in the ongoing
undertakings which give meaning and structure to our common surroundings
(Heidegger 1957, pp. 117ff).
Husserl’s approach to intersubjectivity initially took its point of departure
with the face-to-face or I–Thou situation as a phenomenological problem (Hus-
serl 1962a). But he discovers another approach to being with others in his late
work when dealing with what he calls the crisis of European science (Husserl
1962b). Husserl’s treatment of consciousness had from the start taken scientific
cognition as a primary focus, asking questions about how we move from the
world of perception to the scientifically warranted judgments that make up our
theoretical disciplines, including humanistic and psychological as well as natural
sciences. For the most part Husserl’s approach to these questions seemed to
make the assumption that the individual subject, in pursuit of scientific knowl-
edge, could simply transcend the limitations of its concrete social situation and
somehow move directly to the truth. What he finally appreciated in his late work
on the crisis of the sciences is that theoretical inquiry is necessarily an intersub-
jective affair. He recognized that, in the pursuit of theoretical truth, the individ-
ual always inherits this pursuit as an existing and ongoing activity of the society
in which she or he takes it up. The problems and questions of science do not
come out of the blue, but out of a tradition of ongoing inquiry. The individual
not only inherits the questions but often builds on the answers already obtained
by others as the basis for further work. Even when the primary motivation for
inquiry is criticism of the existing solutions to problems, rather than acceptance
of them, as is so often the case in science, these prior solutions furnish the con-
text and background for ongoing inquiry. Thus a cognitive endeavor like science,
even though it is pursued by individuals, owes its undertaking in each case, as
well as its forward motion, to the social context in which it exists.
These considerations cast science in a new light for Husserl, though they are
not isolated in the philosophy of science. In fact, they resemble some of the in-
sights of pragmatists like Dewey before him, even as they foreshadow later post-
empiricist developments in the analytic philosophy of science. What is impor-
tant for our purposes, however, is that they facilitate a new approach to
intersubjectivity that parallels and complements Heidegger’s treatment of being
with others. What is more, this approach turns out to extend beyond the realm
of scientific inquiry, which can be seen as but one instance of a larger pattern.
How should we characterize one’s relation to others in a shared scientific in-
quiry? They are encountered as fellows, colleagues, co-participants in a common
project. To be sure, this kind of encounter presupposes the face-to-face relation,
at least implicitly, since members of the scientific (or any other) community are
after all individuals interacting with one another. But while the face-to-face en-
counter has its own dynamic of concerns, these are bypassed in the communal
approach to these individuals. What counts about them for me is not their inner
life or their total existence, but merely their engagement in an activity that is
oriented toward a goal that I share. More is shared than just the goal, of course:
There are explicit or tacit standards and rules about how inquiry is to be con-
ducted; shared notions of what counts as a valid contribution to the inquiry, and
much more. As we know from the case of science, the others are not confined to
my immediate colleagues or lab partners, but include other members of the pro-
fession at large, especially other specialists in the same field. Clearly the standard
terms for the intersubjective encounter do not apply here: The Other as alter
ego, autrui, appearing in a face-to-face confrontation, object of empathy or sym-
pathy, returning my regard and putting me to shame or reducing me to an object,
à la Sartre—all these terms seem inappropriate to the situation at hand.
9. “We” and the Community

To correctly describe and fully understand this relation to others, characterized
by co-participation or common endeavor, we need to introduce an indispensable
new term, namely that of the group to which I and the others belong. It is pre-
cisely as fellow members of a group that others are encountered in this way, and
so we need to explore what “group” means in this context, to understand how it
exists, how far it extends, etc. What we have in mind here is not merely an objec-
tive collection of individuals, united by some common characteristic like size,
shape, hair color, or complexion. The relevant sense of group for our purposes is
united from the inside, not from the outside. The word most often used to convey
this sense of group is community, Gemeinschaft (sometimes contrasted with Ge-
sellschaft). These terms derive from the common or the shared, but this must be
understood in a special way.
If the community makes possible a certain kind of encounter with others, how
do I encounter the community itself? It too is not primarily an object standing
over against me as something to be perceived or known, as if I were an anthro-
pologist or sociologist. I relate to it rather in terms of membership, adherence, or
belonging. The sign of this relation is my use of the “we” to characterize the sub-
ject of certain experiences and actions. The possibility that the community can
emerge as a “we”-subject affords a way of understanding not only the nature of the
community but also the peculiar character of being with others that makes it up.
One thing to be noted is how such a community relates to the possibility of
phenomenological understanding. Phenomenology is often characterized, as we
have seen, by the first-person character of its descriptions. By shifting our atten-
tion from the “I” to the “we,” it is not necessary to leave the first-person point of
view behind; we merely take up the plural rather than the singular first person.
This shift from the I to the We reveals an interesting connection between 20th-
century phenomenology and Hegel’s phenomenology, a connection that has
always been murky and little understood. In the Phaenomenologie des Geistes the
author introduces the key notion of his work, that of Geist, by calling it “an I that
is We, a We that is I,” in other words a plural subject (Hegel 1952, p. 140). It is
Geist that forms the true subject of the dialectical forms that Hegel describes in
his phenomenology, and which later figures as the central concept in his philoso-
phy of history. Hegel is often criticized for reifying Geist, giving it a life and a
mind of its own independently of that of the individuals involved, and this criti-
cism may in part be justified. But it is possible to have a more modest or re-
stricted sense of the ontology of the We. It exists, we can say, just as long as its
constituent individuals say and think “we.” In this sense it is entirely dependent
on the individuals that make it up. Thus we can frame the very controversial
notion of the collective subject in a way that avoids a dubious ontological reifica-
tion and stays close to our experience of social existence. Here there is nothing
more common in social life, and nothing more important, than the membership
of the individual in communities of various kinds. This can be subjected to phe-
nomenological description.
Such description involves reflecting on those occasions and experiences in

which I identify myself with a group or community by enlisting, so to speak, in
the “we.” It happens when the experience or action in which I am engaged is at-
tributed not just to me but to “us,” when I take myself to be a participant in a
collective action or experience. But the action or experience must be enduring
or ongoing, and with it the existence of the collective subject, the “we.” To say
that we build a house is not equivalent to saying that I build a house, you build a
house, she builds a house, etc. The common project is articulated into subtasks
distributed among the participants such that the agent cannot be any of the
members singly but only the group as such.
To say that I enlist in or participate in such collective endeavors or experi-
ences is to say that I identify myself with the group in question, and this sense of
“identifying oneself ” deserves our attention. As we said before, the identity of
the subject is not a given but constitutes itself over time as a sort of project, and
I identify myself in relation to others (see also Carr 1987, Chelstrom 2013, and
Searle 1995.). This is often taken to mean that I gain my identity in opposition to
others, but it is also true that one asserts one’s identity by joining with others.
This brings us into the territory of “identity” as it is used in such phrases as “iden-
tity crisis” and “identity politics.” As an individual I identify myself with certain
groups and thus construe my identity in terms of my belonging. Among these
are family, profession, religion, nationality, culture, etc. “We are getting closer to
a cure for Parkinson’s,” says the medical researcher, even though she may not be
involved in this project directly. “We believe in the virgin birth,” says the Chris-
tian. “We Peabodys arrived in Massachusetts in 1640,” says Ms. Peabody. In
these cases the nature of the community referred to by “we” is pretty clear. “We
landed on the moon in 1969.” And who are we, in this case? Here perhaps we
speak on behalf of the human race as a whole.
This is the same sense of identity that has been a subject of some controversy
between communitarians and liberals in political philosophy. The former (Mi-
chael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and others) proclaim the value for the individual
and for social order of the individual’s rootedness in the community, and warn us
against the rootlessness of modern society; the latter (e.g., Habermas, and more
recently Anthony Appiah) defend the values of individuality, “post-conventional
identity,” and cosmopolitanism against what they see as the closedness and con-
servatism of the communitarian approach (see Habermas 1979, p. 80). These
debates are certainly relevant to what I am trying to do here, but it also impor-
tant to see the differences. They are normative, for one thing, arguments about
which forms of social and political organization best suit human needs. Both
sides admit that community identification exists and plays an important role in
human life, for good or ill. Also, as such notions as “post-conventional identity”
and cosmopolitanism indicate, even the liberals envisage a form of collective
identity and solidarity, as long as it is based on political principles rather than

such traditional forms as ethnicity, language, or nationality.
Thus individuals identify themselves with groups that range from small and
intimate to larger and more encompassing. But it must not be thought that these
groups nest easily inside each other like a series of concentric circles. Groups
criss-cross one another, and I identify myself sometimes more with one than
another, depending on circumstances. Furthermore, participation in one may
not always be compatible with participation in another. Family may conflict with
profession, class with country, religion with civic duty, etc., to name only a few of
the classic conflicts. These conflicts can be personal and psychological, “identity
crises” in which the individual is torn between conflicting commitments and
allegiances; and through the individuals involved the conflicts can be social as
well, pitting groups against each other in collective action and enmity. The inter-
subjective relations involved here take a new twist: I relate to my fellows as mem-
bers of the same community, with whom I say “we.” And I relate to others not
just as other individuals but as members of an opposing group: “them” vs. “us.”
10. Community and Historicity

Much more could be said about various aspects and implications of the We-
relation, but I want to turn now to its relevance to our topic. We have been look-
ing for a connection between time and social existence that could be described
as the experience of historical existence. I want to contend that it is in the experi-
ence of membership in communities that time is genuinely historical for us. As a
member of a community I become part of a We-subject with an experience of
time that extends back before my birth and can continue even after my death.
Since the We is experienced as genuinely subjective, it has the same sort of tem-
porality as the I-subject. That is, it is not just an entity persisting in time, or a
series of nows, but occupies a prospective–retrospective temporal field encom-
passing past and future. Just as we attribute agency and experience to the we-
subject, so we can speak of its expectations and its memories. History is some-
times spoken of as “society’s memory,” the manner in which it retains its past
such that the past plays an enduring role in the life of the present. To put it an-
other way: We noted before that the present is for the I-subject the vantage point
which gives access to a temporal field encompassing past and future; likewise,
for the we-subject, the present functions as a similar vantage-point. But the field
which is opened up in this case is much broader. It is to this field that I gain
access in virtue of my membership and participation in a community.
But there is more to it than this. Engaged in a community by using the term
“we,” I enjoy a special relationship with my fellow members, as we have seen. But
these fellow members are temporally differentiated in significant ways. Alfred

Schutz (1967, p. 208) spoke of the difference between contemporaries, prede-
cessors, and successors, but this distinction is much too simple. My contempo-
raries are further differentiated into elder and younger, distinctions which are
more than just chronological. In family, ethnic, and professional contexts, elders
are traditionally considered more knowledgeable and more experienced, and act
as parents, guides, and mentors to the younger. Professional relations often
mimic family relations, as in Germany, where the dissertation director is called
the Doktorvater. Just as important as this benign relationship is the agonistic,
indeed Oedipal, struggle in which the young rebel against the domination of the
old, break away and establish their independence. So often, of course, this classic
youthful rebellion, instead of securing the emancipation of the individual from
the group, only reveals the individual’s deeper, inextricable dependence and
adherence.
In any case, these intergenerational relations and tensions show that being a
member of a community means belonging to a temporally continuous entity
whose temporality exceeds that of my own subjectivity. With regard to the past,
its reach gradually expands in a kind of relay-form from elders to ancestors and
predecessors who came “before my time”—that is, before my experience and
before my birth. One way of thinking of this relation is to think of the circle or
sequence of acquaintances. This is the popular idea of “degrees of separation,”
which are also degrees of indirect connection. Regarded synchronically, this
connection relates each of us to contemporaries with whom we have no other
connection; but it is also characteristic of our relations with members of the
communities to which we belong. Seen in a diachronic frame, this circle of ac-
quaintance extends very rapidly into the past. Living in the 21st century, I knew
a member of my family (my great-grandmother), born during the American
Civil War, who herself knew her grandparents, born in the 18th century. I am
thus related by one degree of separation/connection, by indirect acquaintance,
if you will, to my 18th-century forebears.
With these examples, and with such familiar uses of the term “we,” I hope to
convey the sense in which, as members of families and other communities, we
have a direct and lived relationship to history. To be sure, this direct relationship
includes much more than this. It extends, as we saw, to our physical surround-
ings, where the very contours of the land, the patterns of roads and streets, and
many of the buildings we inhabit, and often even the furniture we use, are older
than we are. But even this physical world is part of the human world of overlap-
ping communities with which we identify ourselves. One could say much more
about the role of the past in ethnic and national identities, political and religious
allegiances, which are such a decisive force, for good and ill, in the contemporary
world. But the general point is that it is in solidarity, membership, participation
with others in communities that the past is most alive and vivid for us. It is here
that it functions as part of our identity as individuals and enters into our lives
and everyday experience.
Obviously we are moving here in the realm of popular mentality and even
mythology. But it is here that historicity is most vivid and efficacious in our
sense of who we are. It operates with different intensity and in vastly different
ways in different social and historical contexts. Americans, as everybody knows,
are blessed or cursed with a history than lends itself generously to popular my-
thology. Unlike many modern states we trace our identity to a fairly clear-cut
“birth of a nation,” itself mythologized in the early stages of cinema, our most
enduring contribution to popular culture. We owe this birth to “founding
fathers”—a miraculous birth indeed, since it seems to have occurred without the
help of founding mothers. Or alternatively, but still with the aura of a family
drama, our origins are found in an act of youthful rebellion against the “mother
country,” leading up to the adoption of a written constitution that begins with
the words “we, the people.” Four score and seven years later, we were engaged in
a great civil war testing whether our nation could endure. Abraham Lincoln’s
famous speech at Gettysburg in 1863, which I am paraphrasing here, uses the
“patriotic we” in the grand tradition of political rhetoric which can be traced
back to Pericles and Gorgias. (See Wills 1992.) The success of political leader-
ship is the capacity to translate this rhetorical device into political reality. Wars
and other crises, of course, lend themselves to the realization of the “we.” And
when we have the sense of living through history, in dramatic and pivotal mo-
ments like the presidential election of Nov. 4, 2008, the breach of the Berlin Wall
on Nov. 9, 1989, or the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we are communalized by the
shock of the unexpected and the uncertainty of the future. In Section 12 I want
to deal with these examples in greater detail.
These examples remind us again of the temporality of historical existence.
They reveal that such existence is often as much a matter of the future as of the
past, as Heidegger argued. But we usually identify historicity with the manner in
which the past plays a role in the present. What my analysis shows, I think, is that
it is primarily as members of communities of various sorts that we experience
the reality of the past in our present lives. It is here that such terms as “tradition,”
“inheritance,” “legacy” come into play. In the agency of the “we” the past is not
just passively given; we take it over or, as Heidegger put it, we “hand down” to
ourselves the legacy of the past (Heidegger 1957, p. 383). Communal existence
is active in many ways, but a constant feature of its activity is the manner in
which it appropriates its past. That this is an activity is evident from the varying
forms this takes. We select from the past what we wish to take over and neglect
what we wish to forget. Indeed, remembering and forgetting are central activi-
ties by which communities constitute themselves. Remembering leads to
c ommemoration and memorialization, in which we celebrate our heroes and

achievements in monuments and popular songs on national holidays. The si-
lence of forgetting can seek to evade responsibility for evils such as slavery or
genocide; but it can in some cases have the beneficial effect of overcoming past
resentments and grievances. Some communities remember too little; others re-
member too much.
Let us summarize the results of our account of historicity. We exist histori-
cally by virtue of our participation in communities that predate and outlive our
individual lives. Through the we-relation historical reality enters directly into
our lived experience and becomes part of our identity. Our membership gives us
access to a past, a tradition, and a temporal span that it not so much something
we know about as something that is part of us. This is the primary sense in which
we are, in Dilthey’s sense, historical beings before we are observers of history;
this is the sense in which we are “intertwined” with history. The experiential ap-
proach to history does not address itself directly to the traditional questions of
the philosophy of history, questions of what history is in itself and of how we
know it, though it can, as we shall see, cast some indirect light on these ques-
tions. But it does address the question of why we should be interested in the past
at all.
11. History and Retrospection

We have attempted to both refine and enrich the concept of experience by at-
tending to its temporal and intentional features; and we have tried to show how
in the human world we have something like a direct, experiential access to his-
tory. But let us return to a problem we encountered at the beginning: The con-
cept of experience, for all its historicity, is still tied directly to the present. Experi-
ence is in the present and of the present. Our account has not challenged this. In
sense one experience is of the here and now, even though it involves retentional
and protentional horizons. In intentional relation to the human world of per-
sons, their actions and experiences, it reaches into the indefinite past and future,
to be sure, and this is how it becomes the extended and cumulative experience in
sense two, where historicity reveals itself. But as we’ve seen, even experience in
this sense is centered in the present. The past has the sense of horizon or back-
ground which is brought to bear on the present, giving it its sense and affecting its
future.
But isn’t history centered in the past? Indeed, there is a strong tradition of
opinion in the philosophy of history that our access to the genuinely historical
requires a disengagement from the present. How do we move from being “inter-
twined” with history, in Dilthey’s terms, to being “observers” of history? What
we need, according to this view, is not just the retention of the past, as back-
ground for the present, à la Husserl, but something more like the recollection of
the past, in which it becomes not the background but the focus. This is part of
the idea behind the link between history and memory. In this more traditional
sense of memory (recollection), we leave the present behind to immerse our-
selves in the past. The present must even first of all be forgotten, in order to be
revived in memory. What is required is our capacity for retrospection.
Here’s how the retrospection view of history develops: It holds that every-
thing historical is past. Yet everyone would agree that not everything past is
historical. Most of the past, the vast majority of all the things that happened,
are neither recorded nor remembered, and consequently are lost forever. And
rightly so: They are insignificant, their loss is no loss, and in any case we need
some economy and efficiency in our representations and our memories. The
archives can’t hold everything—or so we used to think. Our memories,
anyway, are still limited. We need to hold on only to what is important. And
so we shade into another sense of “historical”: Only some past events are
historical events. Which ones? The important ones. But which are important
and why?
This is a big question, and there are probably many different answers to it; not
all important events are important in the same way or for the same reasons. The
obvious examples—wars, revolutions, political and social upheavals—all qual-
ify as important in several senses: They affect the lives of many people, they are
turning points that change the direction of events, etc. Here we encounter prob-
lems that have divided historians and attracted the attention of philosophers of
history: on what grounds are the important events separated out from the unim-
portant ones; how do we group the events of the past into periods by marking
the boundaries between them; how do we evaluate the relative importance of
the political, the social, the economic; and so on.
However we may decide, if indeed we need to decide, on what’s important
and thus what qualifies as “historical,” there seems to be widespread agreement
on one thing: We can discern what’s important only retrospectively. This is a point
made forcefully and famously in Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History
(1965). In the context of the epistemology of history, he made this point to
counter the naïve supposition that history is somehow at a disadvantage because
the objects of its inquiry are past. Unlike the natural or social sciences, which can
avail themselves of observations to test their theories, the objects and events of
the past are gone forever, and lost to observation, and can be retrieved or recon-
structed, if at all, only by laborious inferential inquiry based on the evidence of
documents, ruins, and the like. The historian is thought to lament: Oh, if only I
could have been there to observe the events I’m trying to explain, then I could
know them as certainly as the scientist knows his objects.
Not at all, says Danto. It is only retrospectively that we know what to include
in history. Historical claims take the form of what he calls “narrative sentences”
(pp. 143ff.) that describe events in terms of their subsequent consequences.
Events are important because of what comes later, and observation would reveal
nothing about their true significance and be no help at all. Examples abound:
Columbus and his crew had no idea they were discovering America. Anyone
observing Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg
in 1519, would have no idea he was launching the Reformation; indeed, Luther
himself did not know this. Those angry Parisians storming the Bastille in 1789
couldn’t know they were setting off the French Revolution. The assassin of the
Archduke Ferdinand in Sarejevo, in 1914, did not know he was starting World
War I—and on and on. No doubt these events were important, in some cases
matters of life and death, to those participating in or observing them. But their
historical significance—our reason for including them in the historical ac-
count—was hidden from them because the future was hidden. It was not avail-
able to observation.
Danto’s point about retrospection had already been made by Dilthey, and
both realized the limitations their view placed on historical knowledge. If the
historical truth of an event is available to us only in hindsight, then events in our
future may change its significance even further. Henry Kissinger, on one of his
trips to China, is reported to have asked Zhou Enlai for his view on the signifi-
cance of the French Revolution. “Too early to say,” was the reply. Those who
thought or hoped that the controversies about the French Revolution would fi-
nally recede from French politics, when they celebrated the 200th anniversary in
1989, were of course disappointed. Dilthey saw the consequence of all this: “one
would have to wait for the end of history to have all the material necessary to
determine [an event’s] meaning” (1970, p. 288). His comment is ironic, but it
reminds us that it is Hegel who ultimately lies behind this link between truth and
retrospection. Because Hegel believed in absolute truth, he had to have an end of
history. This idea was revived in a widely read book (The End of History and the
Last Man) by Francis Fukuyama (1992), a book to which we shall return in
chapter IV His view was popular for a time among neo-conservative theorists,
but it is not widely shared. Without it we have to admit that our historical knowl-
edge is limited by our historical-temporal standpoint.
There have some dissenters from this truth-in-retrospection view. Fustel de
Coulonges, the great historian of antiquity, said (according to Walter Benjamin)
that if you want to revive an epoch, you should forget that you know about what
came after it. Benjamin (2003, p. 405) was fond of quoting this view, with which
he disagreed, in his own reflections on history. And indeed historians sometimes
attempt to understand how an action or event was perceived by those involved at
the time, trying hard to ignore what we know of its consequences. It is difficult,
of course, and succeeding at it is surely one of the greatest challenges to the his-
torical imagination. Niall Ferguson believes that retrospection fosters the illu-
sion of inevitability in historical developments, and he edited a whole collection
of counterfactual essays called Virtual History (1999) designed to show how
easily things might have been otherwise than they were, how much depends on
chance and above all on the quirks of individual personalities. Even though he
and his contributors are partly just having fun, their target, of course, is the gen-
teel Marxism of Eric Hobsbawm, E. H. Carr, E. P. Thompson, and other 20th-
century British historians (pp. 50–55). (See our extended discussion of Fergu-
son in Chapter 7.)
But while some historians may try on occasion to block out the hindsightful
wisdom of retrospection, as a way of adding something genuinely important to
the historical record, few would dispute that we must consider the actual and not
just the intended consequences of what happened, in the full historical account
of the past. This reinforces the philosophical view of Danto and Dilthey that the
genuinely historical character of an event can be grasped only in retrospect, and
is not available to the direct experience of contemporaries. Representation, rec-
ollection, reconstruction, interpretation of evidence and of documents—it’s not
perfect, but it’s all we have.
12. The Experience of Historical Events

It’s by way of testing this prevailing view that I want to consider a couple of very
concrete examples, the events we might call two 9/11’s: Nov. 9, 1989, which
Europeans and others would call 9/11, since they abbreviate dates by putting the
day before the month; and Sept. 11, 2001, which the Americans call 9/11 be-
cause of the way we abbreviate our dates. The former is the date of the breach of
the Berlin Wall. The latter is of course the date of the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington, D.C. To these I will add a more recent event, the presiden-
tial election of Nov. 4, 2008. What I want to consider, of course, is not so much
the events themselves as our experience of them. The claim I want to advance is
that these events were directly experienced as historical events by those who
witnessed them, and that to consider the experience in this way makes it possi-
ble to challenge the “truth in retrospection” view. Further, I think the experience
of these events, when properly understood, can tell us a lot about the way we
relate to all history experientially.
I realize that the events in question now lie in our pasts, and are mediated by
representation and memory. And their significance has no doubt been affected
for us by what has happened in the meantime. Further, a lot could be said about
the relations among these events. But these are things for historians to say about
them, understanding them retrospectively in light of their consequences and

other subsequent occurrences. (See Chollet and Goldgeier 2008, also Niemeyer
2012.) My point, however, is that in these cases, unlike some of the examples
mentioned earlier, we didn’t need subsequent occurrences to know that these
events were historically significant. We knew it at the time and in and through
the experience itself. They are close enough, moreover, to have fallen within the
lived experience of most readers of this book. Comparable events, like the assas-
sination of John F. Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor, would not share this
feature. So perhaps I am suggesting that we try to block out the intervening time,
in the manner suggested by Fustel de Coulanges, and, in our role not as histori-
ans but as philosophers of history, return to the original experiences we had of
the events themselves.
When I refer to “experience” here, I am of course speaking in the age of
television, the medium through which the vast majority of us were made
aware of these events. I am not referring, not even primarily, to the experience
of those directly involved. However much television may differ from direct,
eyewitness experience, whether it is inferior or possibly in some ways supe-
rior to being there, it shares with direct experience the vital feature of simul-
taneity. If the events are mediated by the television camera or screen, by the
choices of editors or commentators, they are at least not mediated by tempo-
ral distance. Temporality, starting with simultaneity, the presentness of the
events and of our experience of them, is going to be a key element in our
account.
Now think back to the first two of these events. “Stunned disbelief ” is an ex-
pression that probably characterized the two experiences for most of us. In the
case of the breach of the Berlin wall: shock, surprise, no doubt mingled with
joyful optimism for many. In the case of the Sept. 11 attacks the shock and sur-
prise were mingled with dismay, horror, outrage, sadness, and foreboding. But in
their stunning unexpectedness, in the shock and incredulity they elicited, the
two events were alike. The fact that they surprise and shock means that they shat-
ter our expectations, and thus demonstrate how intimately and powerfully our
expectations belong to our experience. In this sense experience, though it is in
the present and of the present, reaches out to encompass the future as well. The
nature and character of those expectations color our present experience: It may
be a simple confirmation of them, at one extreme, or a devastating shock, at the
other, or something on a spectrum between these extremes. In any case expecta-
tion is always part of our experience. Our consciousness of the future is not
empty or open; if it were, we could never be surprised or shocked. Our surprise
and shock reveal that our expectations were mistaken, and because of this we can
be said to learn from experience—from our mistakes—in the sense so impor-
tant for Hegel’s concept of Erfahrung.
Neither event, of course, was without its antecedents. Eastern Europe was
changing rapidly after the advent of Gorbachev, unrest was growing in East Ger-
many, the East German–Hungarian border had been opened to floods of East
German travelers. As for 9/11, terrorist attacks on American embassies and
ships had occurred, and the World Trade Center itself had been attacked eight
years before. Other attacks had been threatened. To that extent these events did
fit into a framework that was understood. But none of the antecedents created
the expectation that these events would occur at all. The importance of these
antecedents emerges from hindsight, and maybe they should have led us to
expect the events themselves, as many people say of the American intelligence
services before 9/11. But in fact no one did expect these events—except, of
course, the perpetrators. Experience, focused in the present, includes its reten-
tion of the past as well as its anticipation of the future. What a shocking and un-
expected experience does through hindsight is to alter the character of the past,
bringing to prominence events that were noticed but not considered so impor-
tant before.
What we have said so far about the temporality of experience—what Husserl
called its horizons of protention and retention, of expectation and recollec-
tion—applies of course to all our experience, and is not capable of capturing the
specifically historical character of the experiences in question. The shocking, the
surprising, the totally unexpected, can occur in our personal experience without
any claim to being historical. For this we shall have to say more.
One thing that is obvious and striking about our experience of these two
events is its peculiar intersubjectivity. I say “peculiar intersubjectivity” because
again, perfectly non-historical experience can be and mostly is intersubjective.
And sometimes the shocking and the life-changing, the sudden reversal of for-
tune, can befall groups as well as individuals, as in the case of an unexpected
death in the family. But these are not historical occurrences. Our two events, by
contrast, were shared in a special sense: To have the experience was to know that
“everyone” was watching, that the event was unfolding before a vast, possibly
worldwide audience. To have the experience was to be part of that group, a group
that was called into being by the event itself. This is what Sartre (1960, pp. 386–
466) called the group-in-fusion, a community which is centered around a single
shared object, which arises out of a prior multiplicity or “seriality,” as he called it,
and may dissolve back into it after the object or event has passed.
13. Levels of Temporality

This intersubjectivity was the correlate of a peculiar sort of temporality attaching
in each case to the event itself. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, p. 342) wrote that
history, like any other science, uses a code to gain access to its objects, and that
history’s code is that of dates and chronology. But dates, he said, are not arrayed
along a single axis but belong to different levels or strata. 1610, 1648, 1715
belong to one sequence; the first and second millennia belong to another; an-
cient, medieval, and modern make up a third; and so on. The point, which has
been made by others as well, is that human temporality occurs on different
planes, perhaps starting with the bodily cycles of sleep, waking, and digestion.
Superimposed on this is the personal history of the individual life-story. Events
are experienced within these frameworks, and get their meaning from them. The
idea of different levels or strata of temporality introduces a significant new fea-
ture to our whole account of temporality and historical time.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was as an event in the history of the Cold
War. It belongs in a sequence including 1948, 1961, 1962, and so on. I want to
claim, of course, that the event was also experienced as such. Each of us has a
different personal connection to the event, we remember where we were when
we learned of it, and so on, and to that extent for each of us these events were
events in our individual lives. But it was not as a personal affair that this event
was experienced and understood by that vast audience of spectators. The Cold
War, which had dominated the national and international scene for more than
forty years, was coming to an end. We knew this, even though much more would
happen to complete the process: The Soviet Union, of course, didn’t fall apart
until 1991.
This sense that the Cold War was ending before our eyes was partly due to
the immense symbolic significance of the Berlin Wall. It was literally the “con-
crete” embodiment of the division not only of Europe but of the whole world
that had existed since the end of World War II. Its breach seemed to tear a hole
in history itself, finally lifting the threat of nuclear destruction that had hovered
oppressively over the whole period. Speaking of symbolic significance, in the
attacks of 9/11, nothing symbolized American power better than the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon—financial power and military power. The
choice of these targets was a master stroke. This event, too, brought something
to an end: the sense of American hegemony and invulnerability as the world’s
“only remaining superpower,” but even more deeply, the sense of safety and
comfort of Americans, whose mainland had not been attacked by foreign
powers since the War of 1812. In the rest of the world, some danced in the
streets, but even some of those who expressed sympathy, dismay, and sadness
felt an undercurrent of Schadenfreude.
Of course the significance of these events was not merely symbolic—far from
it. It was felt in the exuberance of the thousands of East Berliners who streamed
through the wall and paraded down the broad avenues of West Berlin, feasting
their eyes on sights, including the consumer goods displayed in the show
windows of the Kurfürstendamm, that they had never been permitted to see,
even though they were only a few miles from their homes—and which they
could still not afford. And on 9/11, there was nothing symbolic about the thou-
sands who died horrible deaths that day, or about the many thousands more
who anguished over family members whose fate was uncertain. So the events on
both of those days were very real, matters of life and death, joy and sorrow, which
made them personal events for those directly involved. But this same reality also
belongs to the overwhelming significance these events had for the rest of us, who
were not directly involved but were watching them unfold on TV.
On the historical plane, then, these two events each brought something to an
end—the Cold War, the era of America’s superpower hegemony—and part of
the shock and surprise came from the fact that these two “eras” were not even
thought to have an end; they were experienced as extending indefinitely into the
future. By shattering our expectations, they also opened up a new future. And
like the past they brought to an end, the future they opened up, full of uncer-
tainty, danger, and opportunity, was a historical future, not just an individual
future. The uncertainty, danger, and opportunity, the openness itself, were all
situated on the historical plane, on that of the temporality of historical events.
Let us now turn briefly to the American presidential election of 2008. Obvi-
ously the election itself was not unexpected, and even its outcome had been pre-
dicted in the polls in the weeks leading up to the event. In spite of this, Obama’s
election had a certain unbelievability about it, expressed in the feeling of many
people that they “never thought they would see the day” when an African-
American became president of the United States. In addition to his African-
American identity, Obama’s relatively recent arrival on the political scene, even
the strangeness of his name, had lent his election an improbability from the start
that remained in the minds of those who observed the events of that night.
For all its differences, the experience of this event shares many of the features
of the other two examples. The event in question is experienced as historical in
the sense that it belongs on a certain plane with other like events—in this case
presidential elections and the course of minority relations in the United States,
two streams, we might say, that flow together into one event. Like the other two
examples, this one calls forth a special kind of intersubjectivity, where any indi-
vidual witness has the feeling of being part of a vast national and international
audience.
14. The Significance of These Examples

What can these events, and our experience of them, tell us about the connection
between experience and history? They are, of course, abnormal, exceptional;
that’s why they were chosen. But the abnormal can often enlighten us about the
normal, and I think that’s the case here. Paying attention to the peculiar intention-
ality of these examples, let’s talk first about the events as experienced, then about
the experience of these events, and finally about the subject of that experience.
1. My claim is that these events are directly experienced as historical events,

which means among other things that we experience them as belonging on
the same plane or stratum as other historical events, past and future. That is,
they are not just events that occur in sequence with other events; their sig-
nificance derives from their relation to a particular class of events. All three
events are experienced as “turning points,” even though we may not know
what they are turning toward or where they lead. But they are turning points
of a peculiar sort: not turning points in my life or that of my family or of some
particular group, but historical turning points that belong to the class of his-
torical events. The fact that this whole class or stratum comes to our aware-
ness with these extraordinary events suggests that it exists as a permanent
possibility in all our experience, even if most of the time we don’t notice it.
After all, other strata or levels of events—we spoke of the stratum of bodily
rhythms and that of the personal life-story—can recede into the background,
especially when nothing unusual is going on. So we could venture the claim
that we are always open to the historical plane, that it always figures as a per-
manent possibility in our world, in what we might call the ontology of our
lives.
2. This ontology is reflected in the character of our experience itself, in particular
in the temporality of our experience. All our experience is temporal, but we
are conscious of time by being conscious of events in time. What this investi-
gation reveals is that the temporality of our experience is linked to that of the
events which are its objects; the horizon of retention and protention, to use
Husserl’s language, that is, what lies within the scope of our anticipations and
in the background of the past, is situated on the same historical plane as the
event we experience in the past. The unexpected and shocking events we
have considered shatter our expectations and reorder our sense of the past,
but it is not just the past and future tout court, but also the historical future
and the historical past, that are reordered by the experience of these events.
So the temporality of our experience has a place reserved, we may say, for
historical time, situated on a plane that can be activated as the need and the
occasion arise.
3. And what of the subject of these experiences? Here we recall our analysis of
the we-subject, the first-person plural. It seems to me that in these cases we
become members of a special kind of collective subject that correlates to the
historical plane of the events experienced. As we saw, the first-person plural
turns up in many contexts: we say “we,” in all sorts of different situations,

thereby expressing our membership in or identification with some commu-
nity or other: It can be family, political, or social solidarity, professional or
vocational allegiance, and so on. In the extreme cases of the “two 9/11’s,” and
the 2008 presidential election, observing these astonishing and obviously
momentous events, we have, as noted before, the sense that “everyone” is
watching. Clearly this is not literally true, but it is somehow virtually true.
Just as our individual identity lends a certain flavor to these experiences, so
our identity as Americans, Germans, citizens of the Western rather than the
Eastern world, makes our experience distinctive. But these events, I would
argue, are such that they take us beyond particular identities of any kind. Per-
haps there is a hint of the universal subject, humanity as such, with which we
identify so rarely, but which can reveal itself as a possibility on these special
occasions.
Finally, does this analysis count against the truth-in retrospection view of Danto,
Dilthey, and Hegel? Partially, at least. Certainly it offers counterexamples to the
idea that the historical somehow sneaks by us, to reveal itself only after the fact.
It is certainly true that we know more in retrospect about these events that we
did when we observed them happening before our eyes. The fall of the Berlin
Wall raised extravagant expectations, and the 9/11 attacks raised extravagant
fears, neither of which have been realized. As so often happens, political leaders
have used these expectations and fears, especially the latter, for their own pur-
poses. In this sense our examples may be taken as illustrations of the untruth of
direct experience in the historical realm. But untruth and error have many
sources in history; direct experience has no monopoly on that. Our direct expe-
rience may have misled us in some ways; but there is no doubt that the events we
have examined were momentous and unquestionably historical in the strongest
possible sense. They reordered our past and shattered our expectations. We
knew they would be represented by historians and that they would be remem-
bered, even if we didn’t yet know exactly how. And we knew all this, I maintain,
not retrospectively but in and through the experience itself of these events.
III
Experience and the Philosophy of History
1. Taking Stock
Our original proposal was that the philosophy of history could be approached
and improved by linking it to the concept of experience. Certain deficiencies of
the contemporary emphasis on representation and on memory can be over-
come, we maintained, by exploring the connection between experience and his-
tory. Rather than rejecting the concept of experience because of its notorious
ambiguity, we asserted that experience deserves its important place in the his-
tory of philosophy and can become a valuable key to understanding once its vari-
ous meanings are clarified. After examining in Chapter I the dominant uses of
“experience” that turn up in the course of modern philosophy, we settled on two
central, recurrent, and related senses for further attention in connection with our
topic. The first indicates a direct, unmediated, and passive relation to the world,
while the second refers to a temporally extended, cumulative process of acquisi-
tion. These two senses, traceable to Locke and Hume respectively, were found
elaborated in such later thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, and Husserl.
Taking up the phenomenological thread, especially from these last two
thinkers, we were able in Chapter II to expand and enrich the concept of experi-
ence by exploring its temporality and its intentionality. The former, as intro-
duced in Husserl’s retention–protention scheme, was found to provide for a
non-recollective experience of the past, and for the continuity required by the
cumulative and temporally extended, second sense of experience. The concept
of intentionality, in its turn, led to an examination of experience in relation to
objects, events, and world. Introducing the concept of historicity, we encoun-
tered a non-objective “being with others” based on membership and social iden-
tity, and this made it possible to understand the social or “we”-subject.
Finally we attempted to detach history from the supposed necessity of retro-
spection by examining certain exemplary historical events that are directly
accessible to simultaneous experience. This examination further enriched our
treatment of historical temporality by introducing the concept of strata or levels
of events, including most significantly those of explicitly historical character.
65
One thing to be emphasized about our account of experience and history is

that it remains anchored, like the concept of experience itself, firmly in the pres-
ent, the here-and-now. But one great advantage of the phenomenological ap-
proach to temporality, on which we have drawn extensively, is that it shows there
can be no experience of the present, and no presence as experienced, without its
horizon or background of past—and future. This is what Dilthey meant by
saying that we are historical beings before we become observers of history: the
“here-and-now” is possible only as emerging from the past and anticipating the
future. This is true of the flow of our experience itself, and it is true of the mean-
ingful events, objects, persons, and other entities that occur around us and make
up our world.
In some ways the approach offered here echoes the idea of “presence”
found in Eelco Runia’s influential essay (2006) bearing that name. Like our
own account, and like that of Frank Ankersmit (see pp. 31–32), Runia’s
begins by decrying the dominance of “representationalism” in the philosophy
of history (p. 1). He equates representationalism with the search for “mean-
ing,” and takes the position that “it is not meaning we want,” but rather “what
for lack of a better word I will call ‘presence’” (pp. 4–5). The latter is in turn
called “being in touch with reality” (p. 5), which is one of the dominant
senses we have associated with experience (see pp. 11–12). Placing presence
at center stage is a bold stroke, given the unrelenting polemics against the
“metaphysics of presence” that have come from Derrida and his followers in
recent decades. Like Freud focusing on present symptoms rather than going
directly to the past they signify (p. 8), Runia finds the “unrepresented way the
past is present in the present” (p. 1) in monuments and commemorations
through which we can be “moved by the past” before we understand it. (See
Runia 2007.) He seizes on the concept (or trope) of metonymy as a way of
explaining what calls a “transfer of presence,” as opposed to a “transfer of
meaning” (2006, p. 14). While this semantic and literary concept may seem
an odd choice for someone trying to shift the focus away from meaning,
Runia insists that “metonymy is not an exclusively linguistic phenomenon”
(p. 16). He argues that “a modern monument [like the Berlin Holocaust Me-
morial] presents a past event in the here and now, [and] can hardly be said to
represent it” (p. 17).
Runia’s overall project is like our own in wanting “to account for the relation
between historiography and historical reality” (p. 28) and finding “representa-
tion” inadequate to the task. He uses the concept of presence, where we use that
of experience. With his focus on monuments and commemorations as paradig-
matic cases of presence, however, Runia finds the connection to the past in ob-
jects that stand out from the ordinary, and furthermore are intended to connect
us to the past; whereas we are seeking this connection in the ordinary features of
Ex per ience and the P hil os ophy o f Hi stor y 67
everyday experience. Like Ankersmit’s, Runia’s approach is not incompatible

with and may even be said to complement our own.
2. Experience, Representation, and Memory

We turned to the concept of experience in order to overcome the deficiencies
and fill in the gaps that were opened up, we claimed, by the contemporary em-
phasis on representation and memory. How does experience overcome the dis-
tance that these contemporary approaches leave open between our historical
present and the past we turn to in history? It is time to make good on our pro-
posal by returning to the concepts of representation and memory and relating
them to experience as we have developed it here.
The first thing to be said about both of these concepts, before discussing them
separately, is that they seem to refer back to, and thus conceptually presuppose,
an original experience. In view of recent and important philosophical reflection
on the “metaphysics of presence” I want to be very careful about how I express
this. The naïve version of this claim would be that representation re-presents
something that was presented beforehand, and that nothing can be truly remem-
bered that was not originally experienced. A more sophisticated, critical reflec-
tion will question this naïve view by suggesting that representation often out-
runs presentation in many ways: we represent things we have never experienced,
and presentation may in some cases presuppose and be conditioned by repre-
sentation. If the representation is linguistic, the naïve claim seems to replicate
long-discredited views about the relation between language and experience. As
for memory, to assert that it simply reproduces original experience seems to beg
many of the most interesting questions about the truthfulness and deceitfulness
of memory. Moreover, it would suggest that all memory must be cashed in by the
particular experiences of individuals, which would severely limit its usefulness in
the realm of history.
Nevertheless, I want to press on with my claim about the reference of repre-
sentation and memory back to experience, in such a way as to avoid some of the
naivetés suggested in the previous paragraph. Along the way I hope to show that
some of the objections raised there may suffer from a certain naiveté of their own.
3. Narrative Representation
Recall that the concept of representation, in the 20th century and beyond, has
primarily focused on that of linguistic representation, and that the primary
form of linguistic representation found in history is widely agreed to be
narrative. The discussion of this literary genre as the vehicle for historical
knowledge has been at the center of the philosophy of history since the 1960s,
and I shall have more to say about this development in Chapter V. Earlier on I
mentioned the name of Hayden White as the thinker who is best known for
raising skeptical doubts about the capacity of narrative to represent the reality
of the past. White, along with Louis Mink and other theorists of the 1970s, after
devoting a careful study to the formal features of narrative as it appears in his-
torical and fictional writing, concluded that historical narrative inevitably dis-
torts and transforms the reality it depicts even as it pretends to represent it “as it
really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen, in the much-quoted words of Leopold von
Ranke). White’s work went a long way toward undercutting the pretensions of a
naïve positivist and “scientific” view of history that had been alive in the acad-
emy since the days of Ranke, and it ran parallel to the “post-modern” theories of
the relation between language and reality that were gaining momentum else-
where, especially in France.
In an earlier work (Carr 1986) I criticized White, Mink, and other representa-
tives of this skeptical view on the grounds that for all their attention to the formal
structures of narrative, they had neglected the formal structures of the “real
world” historical narratives are about. If they were asserting a formal discrepancy
between the two, they would have to say something about this “real world.” But
in fact they paid little attention to it; if they spoke about it at all, it was with the
disdain typical of the more radical devotees of the linguistic turn: it seemed un-
imaginable that the world would have any distinguishable properties, much less
any formal structure, outside of language. At most it was a jumble of meaningless
events, in temporal terms just one thing after another; it was not so much differ-
ent in form from narrative as it was formless.
Against this view I argued first that the “reality” referred to in historical narra-
tives is not just any reality, certainly not the physical reality of the sciences, but
the human reality of action and experience. This is, after all, what history is
largely about. Far from being chaotic and formless, this reality has a structure of
its own that we are directly acquainted with and can describe meaningfully.
I drew on phenomenology to outline the temporal and intentional features of
experience, in much the same way that I have described them here. My claim was
that the human reality of actions and experiences, instead of being at odds with
the structure of narratives, actually shares many of its features. Like narrative, it
is a temporal sequence of events that are shaped into configurations (with begin-
nings, middles, and endings) by intentions that span future and past.
In making this argument I did not mean to reinstate a “realist” (much less
positivist) epistemology of history, as many commentators, both sympathetic
and critical, seem to have thought. (See Andrew P. Norman 1998, and G. Rob-
erts 2001, where my work is classified as “historical realism.”) I did not claim
that a given historical narrative simply reproduces a “real” narrative already

embedded in reality, waiting to be discovered and transformed without re-
mainder into language. The narrative features of action and experience arise
from the agents themselves, who in action organize past and future from their
own point of view. Historians are situated at a different level, and bring their
own perspective to the stories they tell about these agents and their actions;
they also have their own interests, which differ from those of the persons whose
actions they relate. My point was that story-telling at the historians’ level is the
same kind of thing that goes on at the agents’ level; that the two levels share the
same formal structure rather than being, as claimed, radically different and
unrelated.
One problem with my earlier theory is that it takes “narrative” to be the me-
diator between historical writing on the one hand and “historical reality” on the
other. Thus it takes its point of departure from a term that originally designates
a literary genre and then tries to find features of it in the non-literary world of
action and experience. It applies the metaphor of “story-telling” too broadly and
in doing so runs the risk that the metaphor is construed literally, reifying it in the
process. My present approach is to take “experience” to be the mediating term.
As we have seen, experience has temporal and structural features that lend
themselves to comparison with narrative in the “literal” sense. But experience
can be discussed in its own terms, and does not need this comparison to be
understood.
A second problem with my earlier formulation, and one which has lent itself
to the “historical realism” label, lies with the always controversial concept of the
collective or we-subject. Philosophers have good reason to be wary of this
notion, since it has been used philosophically and politically for ideologically
undesirable ends. But this happens when the we-subject is reified or ontolo-
gized, where it is claimed to have an objective reality independent of the experi-
ence of those who are involved in it. Hegel bears a large part of the responsibility
for this reification: His concept of Geist seems to anoint a supra-individual inten-
tionality with the power to shape history on its own. In Chapter V I urge a differ-
ent reading of Hegel that is more in line with our concept of experience. But
leaving Hegel aside, I want to argue for a phenomenological rather than an onto-
logical understanding of this we-subject. The communities I talk about exist
only to the extent that people identify themselves with them. They are fragile
entities that form themselves in certain circumstances and just as easily dissolve
when circumstances change. They are not “natural” entities but social forma-
tions, often with fluid and changing boundaries.
It might be said that such communities exist as long as and to the extent that
people think they exist, and act on that thought. An example might be the “Tea
Party” that recently emerged on the American political scene. As a social entity,
it exists because it is constituted both by its members and supporters, and by

those who observe it from the outside. Its members say “we” and attribute
actions, attitudes, and influences to the party, or the “movement,” not just to in-
dividuals. What is its status to the outside observer, such as the historian or the
political commentator? Would they simply accept the Tea Party’s assessment of
itself, and take it to exist objectively, etched in stone? Of course not. They might
very well come up with an account of the motives, origins, and aims of the party
that differs markedly from that of its members. As Marx said, we don’t judge a
man by his opinion of himself. At the same time, his opinion of himself is an
important part of how we judge him, and to ignore it would leave something
important out. The Tea Party is more than a collection of individuals shouting
and demonstrating, whose existence takes shape only in the minds of historians
after the fact. Its existence as constituted and proclaimed by its members, its self-
understanding, is something that historians have to take into account.
The same is true of historical events. According to a view like that of Mink and
White, between 1939 and 1945, in Europe and the Pacific, people were fighting
and dying. But only when historians enter the scene, after the fact, do these
events become “the Second World War.” But surely this leaves something out.
The people who fought and died knew they were part of a war, and they identi-
fied with their national armies. They were not just living their individual lives,
they were also conscious participants in large-scale “stories” that explained to
them what they were doing. No doubt there were multiple such stories: They
were certainly different on the opposing sides. Moreover, they changed and were
re-configured as events unfolded. Historians, for their part, may well come to a
view of the war that differs considerably from that of the participants, generals,
leaders and propagandists on all sides. But they cannot deny that the latter ex-
isted, and were probably important influences on what happened. I take up this
topic again in Chapter V, Section 5.
Once my earlier claims about the relation between narrative and the human
“real world” are suitably re-interpreted, they can prove appropriate and useful for
the present project. The principal difference between the position of the histori-
cal agent and that of the historical narrator is that the former is situated in and
acting in the present; the latter, though of course also in the present, is telling a
story that represents past actions. As we framed the problem at the beginning,
there is a gap or distance between representation and the past represented in
history that needs to be overcome. We turned to experience as a way of under-
standing how this gap can be bridged. If experience, as we have developed the
concept here, turns out in its temporal structure to have narrative features, then
we can think of historical narration as projecting onto past events and actions a
form that arises out of present experience itself. Historical representation, as
narrative, must of course be situated at a distance from the human events,
actions and experiences it relates. But it represents them in a form that derives
from and replicates the structure of experience itself.
This is just another way of making good on Dilthey’s statement, quoted
above, that “we are historical beings first, before we are observers [Betrachter] of
history, and only because we are the former do we become the latter. . . . The
historical world is always there, and the individual not only observes it from the
outside but is intertwined with it [in sie verwebt]” (Dilthey 1970, p. 346). Being
“intertwined” with history is just that experiential direct connection with the
human world around us, the “here-and-now” of large social events and actions,
including those situated at the level we called specifically historical. When we
become “observers” of history, representing the past by telling stories about it,
we look for and find in the past just those experiential features we know from our
own experience.
This is of course related to such concepts as empathy and Verstehen, which
have traditionally been associated with knowledge in history and other human
sciences. Dilthey himself invoked the standard formula, ein Wiederfinden des Ich
im Du—finding the I in the Thou (p. 233)—to describe Verstehen. But this for-
mula shortchanges and does an injustice to the phenomenon in question, as we
have already seen. “Being with others” is more than just the subject–object sub-
stitution or transfer implied in this account. As Husserl and Heidegger showed,
we encounter others not only as objects of knowledge but as fellow members in
joint and communal projects. This intersubjectivity at the core of our present
experience is also carried over to our representation of the past when our focus,
as historians, is social reality, community, and past actions. The social character
of present experience leads, as we have seen, from the encounter with other per-
sons and groups back to a group subject—the first-person plural or “we”-
subject—of the experience itself. Rather than finding the I in the Thou, such
experience can be described as finding the “we” in the “you” (you being plural in
this case). This is the sense of collective agency and group membership that we
avail ourselves of when we represent the past in narrative form.
4. Experience and Memory

Memory, as a fundamental concept in the philosophy of history, was the other
idea we questioned at the outset. We proposed that memory, in its conventional
sense, is a revival of something that has been forgotten, and that this leaves us
with a gap between the present and the remembered that has to be filled in. Our
first response was to invoke Husserl’s distinction between retention and recol-
lection, and his claim that the former is a direct awareness of the past that is built
into the very structure of our awareness of the present. This fundamental feature
of consciousness is what secures the continuity of our experience and provides

that every present phase of our awareness stands out from the broad background
of the past and bears the weight, the contours and the shapes of the past within
itself.
Does this now give us a new understanding of recollection, or “memory” in
the usual sense of the word, that allows us to relate it to experience and to bridge
the gap it seems to imply between us and the past? What is the connection be-
tween recollection and experience?
First, we can confirm and find a new understanding for the claim that what
is remembered (in the sense of recollection) must first be forgotten. Consider
the example of watching an ongoing tennis game. If, while the game is still
going on, I pause to recollect the first volley, then this object undergoes a radi-
cal change in status. Recollection involves a shift in focus from the ongoing
present to the past, so it seems clear that the volley as recollected, though it is
identical with the volley previously held in retention, must lose its retentional
status to become the focus of my recollective attention. In Husserl’s terms,
what has changed is the way this object presents itself to consciousness. It has
been “forgotten” just in the sense that as recollected it is no longer originally
experienced. As we noted before, the difference between retention and recol-
lection is not just the difference between “short-term” and “long-term”
memory. Past events in retention are not just gradually transformed into recol-
lections. They just gradually fade farther and farther into the retentional back-
ground. Recollection revives and represents them in their own right, not as
background for something else. (In Husserl’s terminology, recollection is a
species of representation—Vergegenwärtigung—rather than a presentation.
See Husserl 1966, p. 59.)
Retention is, however, a necessary condition for recollection. That is, what is
recollected has first to be in retention. This is just a way of saying that I can only
remember (recollect) things I have first experienced. It is in this sense that recol-
lection refers back to and conceptually presupposes an original experience. It is
this relation that bridges the gap between the present and the remembered.
The predictable objection to this claim will be: But what about false memo-
ries? Can’t I remember something that never happened? Can’t memory be de-
ceptive? The answer: Yes, it can—but so can the original experience. Recall that
we have abandoned the foundationalist sense according to which “x is directly
experienced” means “x objectively happened.” The term “experience” in our
sense, involving both passivity and directness, is used to convey the intentional-
ity and the internal meaning of the awareness, not its correspondence to the ob-
jective state of the world. If I recollect seeing a tennis match yesterday, this
implies neither (a) that the match really took place, nor even (b) that I had the
(false) experience yesterday of seeing a tennis match. What it does imply is that
I believe that I had that experience, and that my recollection is the revival of and
thus refers back to that supposed original experience.
These points are obvious to anyone who understands the post-foundational,
phenomenological approach to experience. The naiveté of these objections
lies in their continuing to appeal to foundationalism long after it has been
discredited.
Our account of experience has an important further advantage that needs
to be stressed here. It enables us to liberate memory from its ties to individual
psychology and make better sense of the notion of collective memory. This
idea, as noted above, is intuitively appealing and plausible, and has been used
by many theorists of history without giving an account of how it is possible.
How do we move from the individual to the collective? We attempted above
to elucidate the reference of recollection back to experience by using the fa-
miliar example of first-person observation: “I” am watching a tennis match
and then remembering it. But recall that our account of experience allows for
the move from the I to the We, from the first-person singular to the first-
person plural. According to our account, experience is social not only in the
sense that it takes in a plurality of other subjects as its intentional objects, but
also in the sense that it can enlist the individual into a We-subject, and thus
into membership in a community of experiencers. Such a community can be
fleeting and evanescent, or it can establish itself for a longer term. Now if indi-
vidual recollections must refer back to individual experience, recollections
can also refer back to collective experience as collective memories. Thus an
account of collective memory would take this form: If I am a member of a
community that has suffered great hardship and discrimination, I can feel that
suffering, in solidarity with my fellows, even if I did not suffer it individually.
And if the group is capable of experiencing that suffering, it is capable of recol-
lecting that suffering as well, and I can share in the recollection even if it does
not refer back to my individual experience. If the community can be the sub-
ject of the original experience, it can also be the subject of the recollection of
that experience.
To conclude and summarize: Experience, as we have developed the concept
here, can be singular and plural, individual and collective; it has a complex
protentional–retentional temporality that encompasses the past and the future,
and thus includes a non-recollective experience of the past. All recollection and
all representation of the past refer back to and are thus grounded in experience,
which makes historical representation (narrative) and historical (collective) rec-
ollection possible. It is in this sense that experience fills in the gap left open by
representation and memory. Thus a philosophy of history based on experience
can overcome the deficiencies of a philosophy of history based on representa-
tion or memory alone.
5. What Kind of Philosophy of History Is This?

We began this study with the assertion that the philosophy of history had been
dominated for several decades by the themes of representation and memory. We
proposed to replace these approaches with a phenomenology of history cen-
tered on the concept of experience. Having now outlined our own approach, we
can clarify it further by placing it in a broader context of different philosophical
approaches to history. The theories of representation and memory that domi-
nated recent decades themselves emerged out of a larger and longer philosophi-
cal tradition. Let us now have a look at that tradition.
According to the traditional classification, philosophy has approached his-
tory with metaphysical and epistemological questions. It has asked: What is his-
tory? and How do we know history? It is not as if these two approaches stood
side by side, however, as separate but mutually respectful branches of the same
discipline. Instead they represent a historical sequence and a battleground of dis-
pute. From its high point in the early 19th century (Hegel), the metaphysics of
history gradually fell into disrepute. By the mid-20th century the criticism had
grown intense; and it was not its results, but its very questions, that were under
attack. This philosophy of history was debunked, from different points of view,
by such widely diverse thinkers as Karl Löwith, Karl Popper, Arthur Danto, and
Jean-François Lyotard. We turn to these attacks in more detail in Chapter IV. The
epistemology of history, by contrast, which had already begun in the late 19th
century, grew in respectability by the middle years of the 20th.
Here questions are raised not about history itself but about our knowledge of
it. Since the days of Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, who explored the differences
between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften, philosophers
have asked questions about the status, scope and objectivity of historical knowl-
edge, especially as it compares with the supposed paradigm case of the natural
sciences. The nature of historical evidence and inference, the distinction be-
tween explanation and understanding or interpretation, between the nomo-
thetic and the ideographic inquiry, etc. were questions raised again in post-World
War II analytic philosophy of history.
The philosophies of representation and of memory, with which we began,
emerged, as we have already indicated, out of this epistemological tradition.
Though the emphasis has shifted from such topics as historical evidence and
causal explanation, the general question is still: How do we know the past?
How does our approach, centered on experience, relate to this epistemologi-
cal tradition? While the concept of experience has traditionally played a primar-
ily epistemological role in philosophy, it should be clear that in shifting emphasis
from representation and memory to experience, we are also moving away from
epistemological questions to something else. This has to do with our criticism of
foundationalism and our adoption of the phenomenological approach. (See

Chapter I, Section 8.)
6 . The Epistemology of History

The epistemological questions mentioned above are perfectly legitimate ques-
tions, but they lend themselves to a certain abstractness. For one thing, they
create the misleading impression that the sense of the past and the role it plays in
our lives is entirely the responsibility of the historical profession, that “our”
knowledge of the past consists solely of what the historians tell us. This is parallel
to the philosophy of science, where “our knowledge of nature” is conceived
strictly in terms of the latest and most sophisticated physical theory, which most
of us don’t even understand. While this approach may be acceptable in the phi-
losophy of natural science (though I have my doubts there too), it seems to me
entirely inappropriate in connection with history. As we have seen, in virtue of
our historicity as human beings and particularly as social beings, we have a very
full and concrete sense of the past in our own lives and in that of the communi-
ties we belong to. Our sense of who we are, whether as individuals, as families, as
institutions, as societies or even as nations, is very much a function of our sense
of where we have come from and where we are going. This lived history, grounded
in our experience, is our first and abiding awareness of the past.
But what is the connection between this “lived history” and the questions,
research, inquiry, methods and results of professional historians? If we are to
understand historical knowledge, as philosophers, we must understand that it is
only in the context of this lived sense of the past that there can arise anything like
the cognitive and critical interest we associate with the discipline of history as it
currently exists. This is the background against which questions can arise about
what really happened and how and why it happened; this is the framework in
which the methods, procedures and goals of an academic discipline have been
developed. Historians are too often conceived by philosophers as if their task
were to construct ex nihilo, as it were, by reading documents or looking at monu-
ments and heaps of ruins, a past with which they have no direct acquaintance.
But as we’ve seen, awareness of the past always already exists in the form of the
experience of continuity and the we-subject associated with such issues as group,
regional, ethnic or national identity.
One way of viewing the historian, or the discipline of history in the modern
sense, is as a check on the public memory. By “public memory” we simply mean
that “lived history” that precedes the questions formulated by members of the
historical profession. This “lived history” is rarely a unified and univocal narra-
tive, and may consist of interwoven strands representing different points of view.
It may also change and revise itself over time. Part of the historian’s task may be
simply to articulate the collective memory, to raise it from the level of tacit as-
sumptions, even practices and attitudes, to that of an explicit account. But then
it can be critically evaluated with a different motivation, an explicitly cognitive
interest. The historian brings an attitude of skepticism and scientific rigor to the
taken-for-granted interpretations of the past which are always there beforehand.
This is a version of the idea that all history is revisionist history, since historians
always begin not only with their predecessors’ accounts of the past, but also,
more importantly, with the public, collective narratives they subject to critical
scrutiny. For non-historians and historians alike, the historical past is continu-
ous with and alive in the things and persons around them, and in the implicit and
explicit longer-term narratives in which present events have their place. In a kind
of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, historians alienate themselves from this living
past. They force themselves not to see what the rest of us see, to question the re-
ceived interpretations of the past that come with our existence in a certain
community.
Thus we can distinguish between the prescientific or naïve sense or experi-
ence of the past, on the one hand, and the critical-historical knowledge of the
past, on the other. But we are not claiming that critical-historical knowledge is
grounded or founded in prescientific experience, much less that the latter pro-
vides evidence for the truth of the former. It is a “ground” only in the metaphori-
cal sense that it is the soil out of which such knowledge grows, the background
against which it stands out, the larger context in which it can be understood. We
noted earlier that even after experience has lost the foundational role claimed for
it in traditional epistemology, it still has a place in a theory of mind. Here too
experience, in the expanded sense we have given to it, figures on a kind of mental
map on which particular claims to knowledge, historical knowledge in particu-
lar, can be located. Our theory of experience is thus perfectly relevant to and
useful for an epistemology of history, while still being different from it.
7. The Metaphysics of History

We can say something similar about the relation between our project and the
older, much-maligned metaphysics of history. First, the differences: In keeping
with the phenomenological approach, we have been asking after the meaning of
history—that is, its meaning for us. On the standard interpretation, the meta-
physical philosophers of history, from Augustine to Hegel, Marx, Toynbee, and
Spengler, wanted to know not just what history means to us, but what it means
in itself, independently of our experience and involvement. For these philoso-
phers, “meaning in history” was the direction and even purpose in history, the
intentionality, if you will, of a divine plan or a hidden reason which functions

independently of, and sometimes contrary to, human purposes. This sense of
meaning was also linked to the idea of theodicy, in which the “slaughterbench of
history,” as Hegel called it, had to be reconciled with divine providence and
benevolence. It is in this form that the metaphysics of history has been character-
ized by its critics as religion-in-disguise, as conceptual confusion, and as totaliz-
ing grand récit. For our purposes the point to be made is that this approach, as
standardly interpreted, is metaphysical rather than phenomenological. It asks
not how history is experienced or given, but what it is in itself. Does human his-
tory consist in a disconnected series of events and actions, or is there an order to
its progression? Does it constitute an advance toward some goal, a decline from
a golden age, or does it move in a circle? Of course we would all like to have an-
swers to these questions, but such answers may not be attainable, and they are
certainly not available from our experiential, phenomenological point of view.
It is possible, however, that phenomenology can consider these questions,
not in order to answer them but to cast light on why they are asked. I see a cer-
tain parallel here—one of many parallels, by the way—to Kant’s transcendental
philosophy. For Kant it was just as important to explain why metaphysical ques-
tions are asked as to show why they could not be answered. He claimed that our
reason demanded the kind of satisfaction that could be provided only by the
ideas of God, freedom and immortality. Similarly, perhaps our sense of history
calls for the kind of wholeness and closure that the classical theories sought to
provide. We want history as a whole to “make sense”—that is, we want it to form
a large-scale narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Given the tempo-
rality of our experience, it seems a natural illusion—perhaps even a “transcen-
dental illusion” in Kant’s sense—that we view the past as a series of steps prepar-
ing the way for the present. On this scenario, the present is the culmination and
conclusion of a process, as it was for Hegel. Or alternatively, in a more Marxist
perspective, the present is experienced as a decisive turning point or crisis in re-
lation to an imminent goal, calling for immediate action. For all its ill repute, the
idea of the End of History retains its appeal. But why?
The phenomenology of history, centered in experience, does not itself engage
in the substantive, metaphysical philosophy of history but reflects on it, in order
to understand how its sometimes grandiose theories arise out of our experience
of history—that is, our historicity. In Chapter IV, we shall take up such a reflec-
tion in more detail.
IV
The Metaphysics of History

and Its Critics
1. The Project of Rereading the Classical Philosophy of History

The year 1989 brought enormous changes to Europe and the world, culminating
in the momentous and hugely symbolic event we discussed in Chapter II: the fall
of the Berlin Wall. The same year produced a small curiosity on a completely
different, but related, plane, that of the philosophy of history. Intellectuals ac-
quainted with the philosophy and theory of history did a double-take when they
learned of a much-discussed article by Francis Fukuyama (1989) called “The
End of History?” Their puzzlement only increased when the same author pub-
lished a book three years later (Fukuyama, 1992) with the same title, to which
the phrase “and the last man” had been added, and from which, more puzzling
still, the question mark had been removed.
Their puzzlement could be explained by the fact that this author seemed to
be advancing anew the most notorious claim associated with Hegel’s philoso-
phy of history. The accepted wisdom of the academic historical and philosophi-
cal community, after all, was that, partly because of the wild implausibility of
this and similar claims made by Hegel, his whole philosophy of history, indeed
the whole project associated with his approach to history, usually labeled the
“speculative” philosophy of history, was long since defunct and no longer taken
seriously by anybody. Had nobody informed Fukuyama of this? To some of us
he resembled one of those aged Japanese soldiers who emerged from hiding on
a Pacific atoll and had to be told that the war had ended many years ago. (I borrow
this unkind comparison from Arthur Danto, who used it, interestingly, to de-
scribe not speculative philosophers of history, but people who still pursue the
analytic philosophy of history, to which Danto himself was a major contributor
in the 1960s. The unkindest cut of all was that Danto also compared such people
to painters still “doing abstract expressionist canvasses as if the whole subse-
quent history of art had not taken place” [Danto 1995, p. 73] more about this
later.)
78
The Metaphys ic s o f Histor y and It s Cr i ti c s 79
When Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man hit the New York
Times bestseller list and was even more widely discussed in the popular press,
the professionals could smile condescendingly and recognize a familiar phe-
nomenon. Arnold J. Toynbee had published his 12-volume A Study of History,
which William Dray calls “the twentieth century’s best known speculative ac-
count of history as a whole,” in mid-century, already long after the supposed
demise of the speculative philosophy of history; and Dray, one of the major
figures of the analytic philosophy of history, remarks that “it was Time and Life
magazines, not scholarly journals, which received that account with highest
acclaim” (Dray 1993, p. 2). Fukuyama’s book could be safely dismissed as un-
serious, then, and the serious among us could spare themselves the trouble of
reading it.
I mention Fukuyama’s book not for its own sake (though I will come back to
it later) but as a way of introducing an examination of the philosophy of history
in its metaphysical—or, as I shall call it, its “classical”—form. Many of the criti-
cisms directed at some of its best-known practitioners, including Hegel, and at
the whole project of such a philosophy of history, are fully justified, provided
we understand this project in a certain way, namely as a theoretical enterprise
advancing cognitive claims about the whole of history. And this is largely how
it has been understood, not only by its critics but also by some of its
advocates.
But I think there is another way of understanding it, one which makes it both
more interesting and possibly more viable as an enterprise, less deserving of
being dismissed. Dray, continuing in the passage I just quoted, hints at what I am
up to here: “Perhaps because an understanding of the past matters so much to
most of us, and because the belief that it ought to be meaningful is so strong,
interest in the speculative philosophy of history has not entirely disappeared.” By
this he means that its classical texts continue to be studied, though often not in
the spirit intended by their authors.
But I want to say something even stronger. Not only the interest in but also
the practice of something like the metaphysics of history continues, as the ap-
pearance of Fukuyama’s book shows. (The second edition of Dray’s book was
published only a year after The End of History and the Last Man, and Dray does
not mention it.) I think it is also practiced in other forms, not so explicitly la-
beled as Fukuyama’s effort. And while Dray is right about the reasons why it
continues, it is appropriate to inquire further into why the understanding of the
past matters so much to us and why the belief is so strong that it ought to be
“meaningful.” Such an inquiry will convince us, I think, that such philosophy not
only has not disappeared, but is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
This is the much stronger claim that I want to advance in this and the follow-
ing chapter. It requires a renewed understanding of this form of philosophy of
history, one which I will pursue by returning to some of its classical texts in such
a way as to seek out the rational motivations behind the questions asked and the
solutions proposed. In particular, I want to claim that the classical philosophy of
history must be understood less as a theoretical than as a practical enterprise,
one which displays historical events along a temporal axis geared to a projected
future, one not be speculated on but to be realized. This is one reason I want
eventually to eliminate the pejorative term “speculative.” The terms “meaning”
and “meaningful,” used by Dray and many others in discussing this philosophy
of history, must be understood in practical, not theoretical terms, and one key to
the problems encountered by this philosophy of history is that its critics, but also
its practitioners, have construed “meaning” as a theoretical concept. The place to
look for an understanding of the classical philosophy of history, in my interpreta-
tion, is the sense of meaning that relates to action and practice—social action
and social practice, more precisely—and to the temporality of the practical-
social world. If we come to understand how our view of history is deeply rooted
in the temporal structures inherent in action in the social sphere, then it will
come as no surprise to us that the philosophy of history has a way of turning up
again and again, long after its very possibility has been convincingly called into
question.
My proposed rereading is both phenomenological and experiential, in keep-
ing with the focus of the preceding chapters. As we shall see in Chapter V, tracing
the foundations of the classical philosophy of history to the temporality of
everyday experience and action will provide us with a perspective on these theo-
ries that belies the lofty metaphysical concepts authors like Hegel employ. Our
focus in this and the next chapter is more on the practical sense of experience
than on the features we have discussed in Chapters II and III. At the end of
Chapter V we will come back to the concept of experience developed earlier, and
make the connection between experience and practice.
2. The Rise and Fall of the Classical Philosophy

of History: The Standard View
According to Dray, it was W. H. Walsh, in An Introduction to the Philosophy of His-
tory, first published in 1951, who “introduced the contrast between speculative
and critical philosophy into the discussion of history by English-speaking phi-
losophers” (Dray, p. 4). Since then, making this contrast, sometimes with slightly
different terminology (“substantive” vs. “analytical” is another version), has been
standard fare in introducing philosophical discussions of history. This distinc-
tion was extremely useful, especially considering the time at which it was intro-
duced: “Philosophy of history” was a term associated mainly with Hegel, and
like that philosopher and the term “speculative” associated with him, it had ac-
quired an ill repute, especially in the English-speaking world. Walsh feels the
need to deal with this problem right away: The first section of his introduction to
the philosophy of history is entitled “current suspicion of the subject” (Walsh,
p. 9).
At the same time, important work was being done in the 1940s and 50s in
English, by R. G. Collingwood, Carl G. Hempel, Dray himself, and others, which
was generating lively discussion and was equally deserving of the title “philoso-
phy of history.” But it was philosophy of history in a completely different sense,
since it was concerned with history in the sense of historical knowledge rather
than the historical process itself, and thus as philosophy it belonged to epistemo
logy rather than to (speculative) metaphysics. The older philosophy of history
was comparable to a lofty “philosophy of nature,” à la Schelling, say, which ven-
tures beyond our warranted scientific knowledge to speculate about the cosmos,
while the new philosophy of history corresponds to the more modest aims of the
“philosophy of science.”
This distinction between the two sorts of philosophy of history, originating
in the English-language philosophy of the 1950s, useful as it is, has had some
questionable consequences. It is presented in the usual, value-free, neutral
idiom of analytic philosophy, purporting to do nothing more than distinguish
two kinds of inquiry in terms of two sets of questions (metaphysical vs. episte-
mological), directed at two different objects (history as process vs. history as
knowledge). But in fact it does more than this, either implicitly or explicitly:
Presented in the climate of its time it is a valuative distinction, since a disdain for
metaphysical speculation was shared by most writers then, at least in the pre-
cincts of analytic philosophy. And in fact, for many such writers (see Danto,
1965), the first order of business for the critical philosophy of history is to show
why the metaphysical claims advanced by the speculative philosophy of history
are illegitimate, and how such claims differ from the legitimate claims of history
itself. While Walsh and Dray, and Danto to a lesser extent, give a respectful hear-
ing to certain philosophers classed as speculative, they are more interested in
getting on to the philosophical analysis of history in the sense they regard as
legitimate.
The standard picture of the “speculative” philosophy of history which
emerged in the 1950s was that its subject matter was the whole of human
history—not just parts or segments of it—and that its goal, in Dray’s words, was
to find in human history “an overall pattern or meaning which lies beyond the
ordinary purview of the historian” (Dray, p. 1). According to Walsh, it seeks “to
discover the meaning and purpose of the whole historical process” (Walsh,
p. 25). Danto borrowed from Karl Löwith a similar formula: “a systematic inter-
pretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical
events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning”
(Löwith 1949, p. 1; Danto 1965, p. 7).
But after this rather ahistorical presentation of the subject matter and goals of
the speculative philosophy of history has been made, in order to distinguish it
from the critical or analytical philosophy, the distinction, which as we have seen
is valuative as well, turns out also to be historical after all. The search for meaning
in history, it seems, originated long before Hegel, perhaps as early as Augustine
or even the Jewish scriptures (see Walsh, p. 11), and continued after Hegel in the
19th century with Marx, and into the 20th with Spengler (whose Decline of the
West appeared in 1918) and, as a sort of last gasp, Toynbee. But by this time the
critical philosophy of history had been launched, and as we’ve seen Toynbee was
regarded as a kind of quaint throwback, at least by philosophers, who didn’t take
him seriously. So it turns out not only that there are two very different sorts of
philosophy of history, but that one sort is better than the other and has suc-
ceeded and supplanted it. In the history of the philosophy of history at least,
then, there is progress! Hence the double-take reaction when Fukuyama’s book
appeared in 1992.
The result, then, of this post-World War II, English-language discussion of
the philosophy of history, is a standard picture not only of what the “specula-
tive” philosophy of history is, but also of its historical rise and fall. It was useful
at the time to sort out the different senses of the confusing term “philosophy
of history,” especially in order to allow the critical or analytical philosophy to
get under way and gain acceptance as a legitimate inquiry, untainted by the ill
repute attaching to Hegel and his ilk. But the concomitant fixing of the nature
of the “speculative” philosophy of history is seriously misleading, as I shall
argue, and it has resulted in a flawed history of philosophy as well. On this last
point, it should be noted that the attempt to dehistoricize philosophy and
reduce it to timeless questions has often resulted in an unintended and flawed
history—what we might call “ahistorical history”—and not only by neglecting
or distorting historical fact. This is not surprising, since past philosophers are
being portrayed as trying to respond to questions formulated in the present
day. Nor is British analytic philosophy the only school that can be accused of
ignoring and then distorting the history of philosophy. Descartes and his later
admirer Husserl are two continental philosophers who begin with a certain
disdain for the history of their own discipline because past philosophers have
not succeeded, in their view, in responding to questions thought “timeless,”
but in fact posed for the first time by Descartes and Husserl. We shall have oc-
casion later to consider the larger attitude toward history of which this is a
special case: namely to view the past as a succession of (usually failed) at-
tempts to solve the problems we are faced with and are successfully solving
today.
3. Hegel and His Alleged Predecessors

Hegel is always the primary focus of discussions of the classical philosophy of
history. His popular lectures on the philosophy of world history (“Philosophie
der Weltgeschichte”), given several times at the University of Berlin between
1822 and 1831, represented Hegel at the height of his power and influence. His
large audiences apparently included prominent Berliners as well as students, and
his lectures were among the first to be edited and published after Hegel’s death.
The published version drew on students’ notes as well as Hegel’s, but its rela-
tively brief introduction (some 100 pages) is, compared to many of Hegel’s writ-
ings, as clear and straightforward as it is comprehensive. This introduction is
probably the most widely read of Hegel’s works. The lectures were first translated
into English in 1857, and study-editions of the introduction have been readily
available since.
The introduction is also, for many, Hegel at his worst. For many of his defend-
ers, as much as for his critics, it is this text above all that gives Hegel and the
“speculative” philosophy of history a bad name. It is here that Hegel claims that
“reason rules the world” and guides history, cunningly using individuals to
achieve its designs; that history begins in Asia and reaches its “absolute end” in
Europe, where the “world spirit” is finally realized in the modern state, seem-
ingly conceived on the model of the Prussian monarchy of Hegel’s time, etc., etc.
While some object to the sweeping and grandiose character of Hegel’s claims,
others object to their content, which seem the epitome of a “Eurocentric” glori-
fication of state power that has fallen very much out of favor. Though Hegel’s
stock has had its ups and down in Western philosophy since his death, he has
never been without followers. But Hegel has remained influential, it is fair to say,
rather in spite of than because of his philosophy of history.
Whether or not this is a justified evaluation of what Hegel has done in these
lectures, there is no doubt that they deserve their status as emblematic and para-
digmatic for a certain approach to the philosophy of history. Their ambition and
scope alone would justify such an important place. The standard definition of
the “speculative” philosophy of history certainly seems to fit: Taking the whole
of “world history” as his object, Hegel is undoubtedly looking for—and claims
to have found in it—its overall pattern, meaning, or purpose. And no wonder:
Those who set out to define the “speculative philosophy of history” have taken
Hegel as their model.
I am less convinced, however, that Hegel’s text should be seen as the culmina-
tion of a philosophical project that began with Augustine and perhaps even with
the Hebrew Bible, as some have claimed. (See Walsh, p. 11, and Löwith, passim.)
There is no doubt that Hegel is a philosopher in the Christian tradition for whom
the philosophical understanding of religion, Christianity in particular, is a great
concern. There is bound to be a certain continuity between Hegel’s ideas and

those of earlier representatives of this tradition, and that will inevitably include
their thoughts on history. But one needs to pay close attention to the differences
as well. The danger here, I think, is not that of reducing Hegel’s project to that of
his predecessors, but rather the reverse, that of projecting Hegel’s approach to
history back onto earlier philosophers. The dominance of Hegel’s philosophy of
history has led some to suppose that previous thinkers were trying to do the
same thing he was.
Let us test this idea by giving a second and somewhat closer look at the pur-
ported predecessors of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Were they in fact engaged
in the same sort of project as he? The question, of course, is not whether they
agreed with his conclusions about history, but whether they were even asking
the same sorts of questions.
The Bible is often mentioned because of the idea that Judaism introduced the
very concept of historical time into a world dominated by cyclical and ahistori-
cal views of time. Indian, Persian, and Greek traditions are portrayed as being
characterized by notions of timeless patterns and eternal recurrence, in which
individual events, both natural and human, get whatever significance they have
from reflecting, imitating, or instantiating these timeless forms. (See Eliade,
1956.) Neither individual events nor sequences of events seem to be “going any-
where.” Their essence, what gives them their being, we might say, lies outside of
time altogether. Even political arrangements—constitutions like aristocracy, de-
mocracy, monarchy, etc.—are portrayed, in the classical texts of Plato and Aris-
totle, for example, as following cyclical patterns of rise, fall, and repetition.
By contrast, for the ancient Jews events both political and religious get their
significance not from a “vertical” and imitative or cathectic relation to eternal
patterns, but from a “horizontal” relation backward and forward to other events
in real time: backward to creation, Adam’s fall, the covenant establishing God’s
people; its captivity, exile, return, rulers, and heroes; forward to the salvation of
God’s people with the coming of the Messiah. Time is the story of a people’s
progress from creation through perils, dangers, and risks to final salvation. Chris-
tianity takes up this historical conception of time and intensifies it, first by af-
firming the coming of the Messiah as a central, real historical event, in the middle
of history, as it were, pointing ahead to a final salvation in the second coming;
and second, by extending the promise of salvation to all mankind through a pro-
gressive spread and universal triumph of Christianity. Creation, the fall, incarna-
tion, and last judgment are unique, unrepeatable occurrences, and individual
events and deeds, both human and divine, are arrayed along a line of time which
extends from beginning to end. Given this conception, events are coming from
somewhere and are going somewhere in time—from past to future. They get
their meaning from their place in this linear time.
There is no doubt that this historical (as opposed to ahistorical) view of time
and human events has dominated Western thinking, in spite of the importance
of the Greeks’ essentially ahistorical views in the same tradition. Hegel inherits
this conception. But does it constitute a philosophy of history? This is more
doubtful. I would venture the assertion that there is a difference between a his-
torical worldview and a philosophy of history, and that philosophy begins when
there is a critical or rational response to certain problems. These problems arise
when people begin to reflect critically on precisely those culturally transmitted
worldviews they inherit, especially religious ones. This is, as many believe, ex-
actly what happened in Greece, where philosophy arose out of skepticism over
received religious teachings, first in cosmology and then in ethics.
Augustine, thought by some to be the father of the classical philosophy of
history, is a case in point. The central object of Augustine’s philosophical reflec-
tion on the religious doctrine he embraced was of course the problem of evil.
How to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with an all-powerful and be-
nevolent creator? In attacking this problem Augustine inaugurates a tradition of
what came to be known as Christian apologetics and, later, theodicy: justifying
God’s ways to man. Formulated in this way, neither the problem of evil nor
Augustine’s solution to it has much to do with history. First he must shift his at-
tention to a related problem, that of divine justice, reward, and punishment.
Because free individuals are responsible for what they do, God rewards and pun-
ishes them as they deserve. Then why do the good so often seem to suffer and the
wicked prosper? Because true reward and punishment are meted out not in this
world but in the world to come. History becomes a problem for Augustine when
these concepts of good, evil, and divine justice are shifted from individuals to
peoples and projected onto the stage of the large-scale social events of his own
time. The conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine (c. 325 CE) was
seen by Christians as the vindication of their religion and the harbinger of its
eventual triumph throughout the world. Now, in Augustine’s time (354–430
CE), the empire was under attack by barbarians, Rome itself had been invaded,
and the empire seemed in danger of destruction. Pagans took this as a sign that
Christianity was responsible for the demise of the empire, and Christians won-
dered why God seemed to be punishing Rome rather than rewarding it for its
conversion and crowning it with glory. Here it was historical developments,
rather than just evil deeds and events, that seemed at odds with religious doc-
trine, and this constituted the problem Augustine felt the need to solve, address-
ing both pagan and Christian audiences.
There is no doubt that the problem arose because of the inherited Christian
worldview comprising a linear conception of universal history whose meaning
and purpose were to be found in the real events of fall, incarnation, salvation,
and last judgment. But Augustine’s solution to the problem was anything but a
reaffirmation of these views. In fact, his conception of the two cities ran, if any-
thing, rather against them. Augustine denied that salvation and divine justice
were to be sought in human secular history or its political or even religious insti-
tutions. Instead, they were to be found in the City of God, whose citizens have
their real life outside secular time. Augustine had already considered the notion
of time as limited by eternity in trying to reconcile free will and God’s foreknow
ledge. His response to the problem of history was to seek the meaning and pur-
pose of history not in history itself, but rather outside of time altogether.
In Augustine’s thought, the Platonic conception of the timeless realm triumphs
over the religious view of history handed down from Judaism and Christianity.
As often occurs in the history of Christian thought, Greek philosophy comes to
the rescue of the religious worldview.
Thus it could be said that while the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition com-
prises a view of history but is not a philosophy of history, Augustine’s critical
reflection on that tradition is certainly philosophy, but not a philosophy of his-
tory, at least not one which foreshadows Hegel’s. In The City of God, Augustine
certainly has a great deal to say about human history, and in particular about the
rise and fall of empire and the place of good and evil persons and acts in history.
He also clearly believes that God intervenes in human history. But it is not in the
earthly city of human history that meaning is to be found. It is Augustine’s audi-
ence that wants to find meaning in history; Augustine counsels Christians to
seek meaning instead outside history. It is to be found in the City of God, “a city
surpassingly glorious whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting
course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it will
dwell in the stability of its eternal seat” (Augustine 1998, p. 64). It is true that
there is something like a history of the heavenly city itself, which is precisely its
“sojourn as a stranger,” its exile among the citizens of the earth. As such this his-
tory has its end or purpose, its eschaton. But this end is to leave the earthly realm
behind and find repose in the eternal. For this reason Augustine’s account is
often called not a philosophy but a theology of history.
After Augustine, authors frequently cited as precursors of Hegel’s philosophy
of history are Bossuet, with his Discourse on Universal History (1681), and Vico
in his New Science (1725–30). Even more attention is paid by philosophers to
history in the later 18th century leading up to the time of Hegel. It is notable that
philosophical interest in history, which lapsed since Augustine, intensifies in the
early modern period following the Renaissance and the Reformation. Both of
these movements had the effect of reviving ancient times (classical antiquity, the
early church) as a way of rejecting aspects of the present and the recent past.
Thus attention was drawn to the differences between present and past.
But Bossuet and even Vico are if anything defenders of the status quo. They
both face the fact that that world seems in moral and metaphysical disorder at a
time when the authority of the church is being challenged. Both answer, even
more strongly than Augustine, with the idea of divine providence, which can
assure us that evil is only apparent and transitory. Bossuet’s effort can again be
called, like Augustine’s, a theology of history and a theodicy, with more empha-
sis than in Augustine on the divine guidance of secular events. Vico’s version is
more novel and more modern, since he thinks of providence as embodied in ra-
tional, developmental laws rather than acts of divine intervention.
None of this, of course, is called “philosophy of history.” That term seems to
have been introduced by Voltaire as the title of a curious text of 1765 which
recounts and comments on the history of mankind from the most primitive
peoples to the decline of the Roman Empire. “La Philosophie de l’histoire” was
later included as a preface to Voltaire’s Essay on the Manners and Mind of Na-
tions. Like Bossuet, Voltaire saw himself as presenting a universal history of
mankind, but his point of view is, as might be expected, very different. With
reference to Voltaire’s coining the term, Karl Löwith remarks that “the inaugu-
ration of the philosophy of history was an emancipation from the theological
interpretation and antireligious in principle” (Löwith, p. 104). In view of the
close association between the philosophy of history and the concept of theod-
icy, it is ironic indeed that the inventor of the very term “philosophy of history”
was none other than the author who in Candide subjected theodicy, in its
modern, Leibnizian version, to withering ridicule. Voltaire’s approach is in this
and other respects so different from that of the authors seen as Hegel’s prede-
cessors in the philosophy of history that in spite of his invention of the term he
is usually not considered a philosopher of history at all. But there is no doubt
that Voltaire, like the other figures of the Enlightenment, has a view of history
as a whole and a way of finding meaning in it. Universal human reason and its
capacity to affect the future are the key. Indeed in the Enlightenment for the
first time, it could be said, the “meaning” of history is to be found within history
itself rather than outside or beyond it, and it is the result of human rather than
of divine agency.
Another 18th-century author who uses the term “philosophy of history” is
Johann Gottfried von Herder in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Men-
schheit of 1784–91. He shares with Voltaire and other authors we have men-
tioned the idea that a philosophical history is a universal history, and for him, as
for Voltaire, this means expanding the traditional scope of history to include
non-European peoples. The authors of this period were the beneficiaries of the
vast new literature of discovery and travel, and many drew the conclusion that
traditional history had been Eurocentric and provincial. But Herder takes this
shared insight in a very different direction from that of Voltaire and other figures
of the French Enlightenment. The latter seek proof of the universality of human
reason and its independence of the traditions of Christianity. Herder by
contrast is struck by the diversity and particularity of human nature, embodied

in distinct peoples and cultures. Rejecting the Enlightenment’s emphasis on
reason, legislation, and science, Herder sees human nature in the expressions of
feeling, such as art, music, poetry, and custom. Thus Herder became one of the
first great figures of the Romantic movement which grew up in reaction to the
Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment philosophers saw the growth of scientific rationality ex-
panding to the political realm, and imagined a future in which reason triumphed
over the dark forces of superstition and emotion. Herder, with his emphasis on
diversity and culture, was less convinced that history was moving in any unified
direction, much less a progressive one. True, his devout Protestantism kept him
from embracing the complete cultural relativism which many would later draw
from his work. But it is unclear whether Herder is a precursor of Hegel in the
sense that he finds a unified “meaning” in the course of universal history.
We have been looking at some ideas and thinkers thought to be forerunners
of Hegel’s philosophy of history in order to test the view that his work consti-
tutes a contribution to a longstanding philosophical project. Were these prede-
cessors seeking “meaning in history” in the same sense that Hegel was? It is true
that they all (and this includes even the skeptical French philosophes) belong to
a religious tradition which believes that history has a direction, toward the salva-
tion and reward of the righteous. It is also true that their philosophical reflec-
tions for the most part begin when they confront a real course of events which
seems not to bear out that belief. But as we’ve seen, the tradition of “theology of
history” that begins with Augustine, and continues with the idea of divine provi-
dence, is inclined to find the “meaning”—origin, guidance, and destiny of his-
torical events—rather outside than inside history. Human beings within history
are in principle incapable of working out their own salvation and need God’s
help. The defeat of the Pelagian heresy had established that point and expressed
a very limited view of human capabilities. It was only in the Enlightenment that
the Pelagian view began to reassert itself, and with this the possibility of “mean-
ing in history” reappeared. It was possible to believe in meaning in history be-
cause it could be achieved by human action and endeavor. But this went hand in
hand with loss of belief in divine providence as the guarantee of meaning issuing
from the world beyond.
Whatever similarities we may find between Hegel’s philosophy of history and
the earlier theological views, they are rendered problematic by the fact that
Hegel’s thought is deeply indebted to the Enlightenment and to Hegel’s
youthful—indeed, to some extent lifelong—devotion to the ideas behind the
French Revolution. It is true that his thought on history also incorporates some
of Herder’s anti-Enlightenment ideas, especially that of the Volk and of Geist
which ties broader cultural phenomena with reason as the subject of history. But
Herder too is a post-Enlightenment thinker, and one of the things he, Hegel, and
their whole generation of German philosophers inherited from the Enlighten-
ment is that ideas of God, and of divine guidance and intervention, cannot
simply be taken for granted. Though Hegel will mention the idea of providence
in his lectures, and even invoke the concept of theodicy, he makes it clear to his
students that “the appeal to your belief is not necessary because the science we
wish to discuss will itself provide the proof of the correctness of that principle
[of providence]” (Hegel 1988, p. 15). But above all the appeal to religious belief
is not acceptable because of the critiques of natural theology that Hegel inher-
ited from Hume and Kant. Kant is the true predecessor of Hegel, of course, not
only in general but in the philosophy of history in particular.
Because he inherited the ideas of the Enlightenment and of Kant, Hegel oper-
ates in a completely different climate from that of all pre-Enlightenment reflec-
tions on history. And this goes far beyond attitudes toward religious belief.
Before we turn to Kant’s ideas on history, it is helpful to reflect in a general way
on the shift that occurred in the late 18th century. According to Reinhard Ko-
sellek (1979), the conception of time itself, and especially of the future, under-
went a drastic revision during these years. Prior to the time of Enlightenment
and religious upheaval, the persisting view of the future was that of a time closed
off by the apocalypse. Opinions differed over when the end would come, and
over whether its date could be predicted at all. But neither its date nor its out-
come was for human beings to decide. The meaning of history is not only out of
human control, it lies beyond the human sphere. This is gradually replaced by a
view of the future which, rather than subject to divine forces, comes under
human calculation and control. The human relation to the future is a matter not
of prophecy, but of prognosis and planning. The future is not something to be
known or predicted, but something to be produced. The meaning of history is
now meaning in history.
Kant invokes this very distinction between prophecy and planning in a seem-
ingly playful and ironic comment in a late (1798) text called “An old question
raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?” The answer to this ques-
tion, he says, would require a “divinatory historical narrative of things imminent
in future time, . . . a possible representation a priori of events which are supposed
to happen then. But how is a history a priori possible? Answer: if the diviner
himself creates and contrives the events which he announces in advance” (Kant
1963, p. 137).
But this comment deserves to be taken seriously, and is in fact consonant
with Kant’s earlier essay “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan
Point of View,” dating from 1784. This is the essay usually regarded as Kant’s
major contribution to the philosophy of history, though it should be noted that
Kant does not use this term. It is important for our purposes to have a clear
understanding of what Kant is saying, and what he is not saying, in this essay. As
should be expected when reading Kant, of course, in no way is the idea of divine
providence taken for granted. There are some recognizable themes here: First,
the idea that history at first glance seems “complex and chaotic” (p. 11) and
devoid of any regular pattern for those who live through it. Second, Kant speaks
of man’s “antagonism” or “unsocial sociability,” the Hobbesian paradox of self-
interested individuals who are forced, if they are to achieve their selfish ends,
into an uneasy association with others, renouncing to some extent their selfish
aims. Nevertheless, he wants to venture that history, “which is concerned with
narrating” free human actions, “permits us to hope” that if we look at the course
of such actions “in the large” we will be able to discern “a regular movement,” “a
steady and progressive though slow evolution” (p. 11). Such a progress, should
it be found, would be toward “the achievement of a universal civic society which
administers laws among men” (p. 16), which is “the most difficult and the last
[problem] to be solved by mankind” (p. 17). He discusses at some length the
difficulties of such an achievement, asserting as he does elsewhere that it would
require solving “the problem of a lawful external relation among states” (p. 18).
This is the greatest difficulty of all, since we can see the same antagonism among
states as among individuals, which has led again and again to war. But after “dev-
astations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion,” nature brings states to
“that which reason could have told them from the beginning,” namely that they
must move “from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations”
(p. 19).
By the time he reaches this point the status of Kant’s discourse on history
should be clear to the reader. He is not making claims about the actual course of
history; rather, he is outlining the ideal conditions under which alone, he thinks,
history could exhibit any progress. Since these conditions are (still!) far from
having been realized, Kant’s claims are clearly prescriptive and moral in charac-
ter. Thus he can assure practicing historians that he is making no attempt to
displace their work, since he is propounding an Idea of world history based
upon an a priori principle (p. 25), an “Idea of how the course of the world must
be if it is to lead to certain rational ends” (p. 24). By using the term “idea,” a ter-
minus technicus from the Critique of Pure Reason, which the translators signal by
means of capitalization, Kant indicates a rational concept whose empirical real-
ity not only is not, but, according to the Critique, cannot be exhibited in experi-
ence. But, like human freedom itself, neither can its possibility be empirically
denied. Thus the course of history does not provide evidence that the “civic
union of the human race” will ever be achieved, but neither does it prove that it
never will be. Its realization must at least be regarded as possible, and the Idea
that we have of it may help bring it to pass (p. 24). Kant is telling us not where
history is going but where it ought to be going. Only in this very minimal sense
can philosophy help “make sense” of history, namely by articulating the “cosmo-
politan standpoint” from which alone it can be freed from its apparent moral
chaos. And by showing that its moral realization is at least possible, it “permits
us to hope” for a better future. Kant’s concept of hope is usually associated with
his philosophy of religion and refers to the individual’s hope for salvation in the
world to come. But here he argues for hope in a better future for mankind on
earth.
In “Idea for a Universal History,” the concepts of a universal civic society, or
league of nations, and of history as progressing toward it, legitimize certain po-
litical choices. They are Ideas capable of guiding our action in the social sphere.
Kant is anticipating the project of expanding his ethical principles, with such
notions as a kingdom of ends, into a political theory. Ethics and politics alike
belong to Kant’s practical philosophy, not his theoretical philosophy. Their cen-
tral concern is not with what is the case but with what we ought to do. And the
same is true of his philosophy of history.
This is not to say, however, that the philosophy of history in this sense is con-
cerned solely with the future. The term “history” as Kant uses it still refers to the
past and historians deal with the past. But Kant seeks a “standpoint” from which
to construe the past in reference to a possible “cosmopolitan” future. He asks
whether the past can be read in such a way that points to the necessity of a cos-
mopolitan future and “permits us to hope” that such a future can be realized.
Past human experience, with its antagonism, its wars and devastations, brings us
finally to see “that which reason could have told [us] at the beginning,” namely,
the need for a universal civic union. Kant’s philosophy of history is a reinterpre-
tation or reading of the past which allows a certain vision of the present situation
and future projects to emerge.
4. Hegel’s Lectures and Their Reception

This is the immediate background, then, against which Hegel’s lectures on the
philosophy of history must be understood. In the Enlightenment and in Kant,
ideas on history had acquired several characteristics which separate them in
very important ways from what had gone before. The focus had shifted from
divine providence to human action, and in particular the power of reason to
affect the world—the human as well as the natural world—and to bring it under
human control. Human beings are no longer passive creatures depending on
God’s protection for their salvation and well-being, but active shapers of their
own destiny. History is now the stage on which this action takes place, and it is
generally represented as humanity’s emergence from the darkness of supersti-
tion into the light and clarity (lumieres, Aufklärung) of reason. But this shift in
focus brings with it a change in the mode of philosophical discourse in which

these ideas are presented. The philosophy of history is no longer a description
of the past combined with prophecy and prediction about the future, but a view
of the past embedded in a prescriptive discourse, enjoining and prescribing
action. Its purpose is to propose ideals to be realized in social and political
programs.
Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant is widely acknowledged, but the relation be-
tween the two thinkers is usually represented in terms of what Hegel rejects in
Kant. The essence of Kant’s philosophy can be expressed with reference to some
crucial and well-known distinctions: intuitions versus concepts, receptivity
versus spontaneity, or sensibility versus understanding; understanding versus
reason or categories versus ideas; phenomena versus noumena or appearances
versus things in themselves; knowledge versus faith; transcendental versus
empirical; is versus ought, descriptive versus normative or theoretical versus
practical; and so on. It is fair to say of Hegel that he rejects every one of these
distinctions, and indeed that their rejection is in some important way the driving
force behind his philosophy. But it is also well known that Hegel’s way with dis-
tinctions is not simply to discard them but to go beyond them in a way that also
preserves that which is surpassed. If this is so, then with reference to the
theoretical/practical distinction we should expect elements of both to be pre-
served in Hegel’s discourse, and this should provide a valuable key for reading
his works. But in fact, in general but especially in the case of Hegel’s philosophy
of history, his work is read and interpreted as a straightforwardly theoretical dis-
course. The first guideline to interpreting Hegel’s work is to be suspicious of any
attempt to reduce it to a series of theoretical claims.
Before going on to the interpretation of the introduction to Hegel’s lectures,
let us attempt a brief résumé of the standard text. He begins by distinguishing a
“philosophische Weltgeschichte” from history proper; philosophy, he says, has
“thoughts of its own,” a priori thoughts, to bring to the study of history (Hegel
1988, p. 10). But the “only” thought that philosophy brings to the study of his-
tory is that of reason—“that reason rules the world,” and thus that world history
like everything else can be seen as a rational or reasonable (vernünftig) affair
(p. 12). Reason not only sets the goal for history but also governs the realization
of that goal. Hegel did not invent this idea, he reminds us; the idea that reason
rules the world goes back to Anaxagoras, and it has also been expressed in the
idea of divine providence. This too suggests a rational plan, God’s plan, but such
a plan is usually invoked when its features are not evident to us. Rather than take
refuge in pious ignorance, however, Hegel believes that the rationality of provi-
dence can be known and explained. If we take seriously the idea of providence,
the demonstration of its rationality would amount to a theodicy or “justification
of God” (p. 18).
The embodiment of reason is spirit (Geist), both as individuals and as peo-

ples, whose nature is to be conscious and self-conscious, and whose actualiza-
tion is to be autonomous and self-sufficient—that is, to be free. But this
actualization is a temporal process, and that process is history. Spirit actualizes
itself and achieves freedom through history, using human passions and inten-
tions as its driving force; but the result of this process is often at odds with the
actual intentions of those individuals and peoples who are thus used. It is here
that Hegel speaks of the “cunning of reason” (p. 35), since reason achieves ends
of its own by using the ends of others. In history, it is only when individuals and
peoples organize themselves into states that freedom can finally be truly actual-
ized. It is here, in law, the ethical life of the community and political order, not in
the mere absence of constraint, that the “positive reality and satisfaction of free-
dom” (p. 41) are to be found.
The actual course of history can be seen as the display of human perfectibility
leading toward the realization of freedom. This pathway is not a smooth one,
however, but consists in the spirit’s “hard and endless struggle against itself.”
Spirit hides its own nature from itself, and is even “proud and full of enjoyment
in this self-estrangement” (p. 59). Individuals and peoples struggle against each
other, and many morally good and virtuous people suffer unjustly. But history
moves on a different plane, and here the acts of individuals, especially those of
the great figures of history, are not to be judged by moral standards. It is the spirit
of peoples, not individuals, that are the agents of history, but these, “progressing
in a necessary series of stages, are themselves only phases of the one universal
Spirit: through them, that World Spirit elevates and completes itself in history,
into a self-comprehending totality” (p. 82).
In several places Hegel presents in the broadest outlines the necessary stages
through which the world spirit has passed on its path toward the realization of
freedom. In the ancient Oriental world only one—the emperor or tyrant—is
free. In the Greek and Roman worlds only some persons are free. It was first the
“Germanic peoples, through Christianity, who came to the awareness that every
human is free by virtue of being human” (p. 21). The realization of freedom is
the goal which gives meaning to what happens in history, and this realization
takes place within history itself, not beyond it. Moreover, it has occurred or is
occurring in “our world,” “our time” (Hegel 1976, p. 524).
Hegel’s lectures have elicited, as might be expected, many reactions from his
successors, both hasty and profound, both positive and negative. We shall not
attempt a complete account of the Rezeptionsgeschichte of this important text,
but we need to comment in a general way on the manners in which it has been
read and interpreted. As we have noted, there has been a tendency to read Hegel’s
work as a whole, and his philosophy of history in particular, in a theoretical way,
i.e., as a series of straightforward claims Hegel is making about the way things
are—or were. Hegel encourages this by the very manner in which he introduces
his lectures, but one must not overlook the defensive and even defiant tone in
which he does this.
Hegel was influential when he gave these lectures, and they were popular, as
we have noted. But neither they nor Hegel’s other work during this period were
ever uncontroversial. When he begins by contrasting his approach with ordinary
history by describing his approach as a priori and “speculative,” he is anticipating
the sort of objection he could expect from empirical historians and empirically
minded philosophers: that he is inventing and constructing history out of whole
cloth, untroubled by the facts. It is as if he is pointedly contrasting the respect-
able empirical approach with his own. Elsewhere in the text too he defends his
“a priori” approach against the objection that he is “importing ideas into the em-
pirical stuff of history” (1988, p. 68). But Hegel is totally unapologetic and even
flippant when he says that the “only” thought philosophy brings is the colossal
and certainly questionable claim that “reason rules the world.” He is immodest
as well, assuring his students that if they are unable to see the whole picture it is
because of their own limited perspective, whereas the result “is known to me
because I already know that totality” (p. 13). Hegel seems to be saying that he is
perfectly aware of the distinction between empirical enquiry and a priori specu-
lation, but he simply doesn’t accept it. Hegel seems to make no attempt to qual-
ify or explain the categorical character of statements which apparently ignore the
empirical constraints on seemingly factual claims.
Hegel’s approach is all the more controversial because he seems to be making
these claims and at the same time explicitly disavowing any recourse to the
assumptions of religious faith. Everything he is saying, it seems, can be demon-
strated on strictly rational grounds. When he invokes the notions of divine prov-
idence and theodicy he seems to be claiming that these traditionally religious
conceptions can now be vindicated without the aid of religious belief. As he
claims elsewhere, religion, like art, is a non-rational expression of truths that can,
in the hands of philosophy, be justified and validated by reason alone. In this
sense Hegel declares his indebtedness to the Enlightenment: Reason must be
distinguished from faith, is superior to it, and can find the truth on its own.
At the same time, the content of Hegel’s pronouncements seems to run
counter to the Enlightenment, at least the severely antireligious version found
in France. Hegel apparently wants to reaffirm, now on the basis of reason alone,
the basic outlines of the Christian faith itself, and of the theological approach to
history. Of course, the anti-religious sentiments of the French were not shared
by many German partisans of the Enlightenment, especially the Protestants—
the confession to which both Kant and Hegel belonged. They were inclined to
see the Reformation as a precursor of the French Revolution, freeing politics
from the power of the church, but also, at least in Kant’s view, liberating
religious faith from reason and restoring it to the inner life of the believer. But
now Hegel seems to want to reinstate the very rational theology that Kant so
severely criticized.
As for history, the open-ended future of the Enlightenment’s approach is re-
placed by something resembling the divine closure of salvation. A progress of
free human actions appears to be replaced by a story whose outcome is deter-
mined in advance. The “justification of God” seems to be a justification of
the status quo: “The insight to which philosophy ought to lead,” Hegel writes in
the lectures, “. . . is that the real world is as it ought to be,” a statement that echoes
the notorious claim in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right (which dates
from the same period) that “the rational is the real, and the real, rational.” (Hegel
2001, p. 18). Another tenet of the Enlightenment approach to history that seems
to be repealed by Hegel is the idea that history is under human control and con-
structed by human action. With his idea of the cunning of reason Hegel seems to
return humans to their traditional status of passive beings subject to divine con-
trol and dependent on an agency outside themselves for their salvation and ulti-
mate well-being.
In sum, what has been generally characteristic of the reception of Hegel’s text,
and has contributed to its rejection by so many, is that it is perceived as an odd
combination of Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment features. On the one
hand it seems to want to reinstate the whole content of Christian theology and
the theological approach to history; on the other hand it wants to present this as
if it were scientific truth rather than an expression of faith. For post-Kantians and
followers of the Enlightenment this is like wanting to square the circle. It was not
only the analytical philosophers of the mid-20th century who distrusted meta-
physical speculation in this sense; the dominant academic philosophers of late
19th- and early-20th-century Germany, such as the neo-Kantians and the posi-
tivists, already had such views.
Even Wilhelm Dilthey, who was more sympathetic to Hegel than the neo-
Kantians and the positivists, and who was indebted to him for many of his ideas,
rejected Hegel’s approach to history. Discussing the “problem of history” in his
late manuscripts, Dilthey speaks of “Hegel’s dream that each age represents a
stage in the development of reason” (Dilthey 1970, p. 359). Referring to the con-
troversy over whether the “value of life” lies in the individual person or beyond
the individual, Dilthey writes that “this way of stating the question transgresses
the limits of all experience and passes over into an empty metaphysics of his-
tory.” The idea that “there is a definable developmental goal for all nations and
humanity has [no] scientific merit. This is precisely my reason for rejecting the
philosophy of history” (p. 354). The “hypothesis relating individual conscious-
ness to some supposed higher, real unity,” and the “inference that there is a su-
perempirical subject, manifesting itself in individual consciousness,” likewise
unacceptably transgress the limits of experience and even spell “the death of his-
tory” because they leave actual historical research behind (p. 354). It is interest-
ing to note that Dilthey says he rejects “the philosophy of history” even though
he is himself philosophizing about history. The very term “philosophy of his-
tory” was by this time simply identified with Hegel, whom Dilthey is criticizing
in these passages.
In the context of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy of history, we need to
introduce a brief discussion of Karl Marx at this point. It is arguable, and many
share this view, that Marx belongs together with Hegel to the high point, the
flourishing stage as it were, of the classical philosophy of history. In the simple
terms of the definition we have been employing so far, Marx takes the whole of
human history as his subject, and attributes to it an overall meaning, purpose, or
goal. Moreover, like Hegel he believes that this meaning is to be found in history,
not beyond or outside it. Thus in the minds of many scholars who seek to under-
stand the philosophy of history as a philosophical project, and especially in the
minds of those who are critical of this project, Marx cannot be left out and must
be looked at as a companion to Hegel in this enterprise.
The problems of taking this approach are well known and need to be men-
tioned only briefly. Marx admitted some indebtedness to Hegel but generally
thought of himself as the anti-Hegel, whose idealism “stands on its head” and
must be turned right side up again. More important, Marx rejected not only
Hegel, and Hegel’s philosophy of history, but academic philosophy as a whole,
wanting to be read and understood strictly as a social theorist. The audience to
which his and Engels’ works were addressed was not philosophers but political
activists.
These difficulties notwithstanding, it seems beyond doubt that Marx ex-
pounds a philosophy of history in the “classical” sense. Even understood as a
blueprint for reform or revolution, his work is founded on and cannot be under-
stood apart from an account of history. This account is summarized neatly by
Engels in his preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto, in
which he states what he calls the “fundamental proposition of Marxism.” “In
every historical epoch,” Engels writes, “the prevailing mode of economic pro-
duction and exchange and the social organization necessarily following from it”
form the basis of that epoch. “Consequently the whole history of mankind . . .
has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited,
ruling and oppressed classes.” The outcome of this history is that “nowadays, a
stage has been reached” where the emancipation of the exploited and oppressed
class—the proletariat—from the exploiting and ruling class—the b ourgeoisie—
would entail “at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at
large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles”
(Marx 1998, p. 48).
The first sentence of this summary is meant to express the fundamental differ-
ence between Marx and Hegel: It is economic or “material” relations, not ideas,
which drive history. The political and intellectual aspects of any epoch are a sec-
ondary superstructure dependent on the economic base. But the notion of his-
tory as class struggle recalls Hegel’s description of the spirit’s “hard and endless
struggle against itself,” its “self-estrangement” in which it “must overcome itself
as its own truly hostile hindrance” (Hegel 1988, p. 59). In the background of
these descriptions is Hegel’s famous account in the Phenomenology of the strug-
gle between master and servant, an account that can be interpreted in quite eco-
nomic and material terms, and which is certainly an account of exploitation and
oppression. As Marx admits, this is the origin of a “dialectic” account of the
movement of history, which he appropriates for his own purposes. Finally, in
Hegel the broadest outlines of history—from “one is free” to “some are free” to
“all are free”—make up a trajectory whose endpoint is, as for Marx, a final and
definitive emancipation.
In the political tract to which Engels’ preface is attached, and also in the eco-
nomic analysis which supports it (especially in Capital), Marx presents his ac-
count of history in straightforwardly categorical terms. He not only rejects
Hegel’s “idealist” philosophy of history; he also rejects that of the utopian social-
ists and communists (he mentions St. Simon, Owen, Fourier). What he offers is
not utopian but “scientific” socialism based on a scientific account of history.
And his projection of the endpoint of the historical process takes on the guise of
a scientific prediction: Speaking of the bourgeoisie, he writes that “its fall, and
the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Marx, p. 16).
Another element the two theories of history share has to do with the role of
the individual as agent in history. For Hegel the individual continues to act and
desire, but the true agent of history is reason or spirit—Volksgeist or Weltgeist—
which works toward its own goals, often quite different from and opposed to
those conceived by individuals. For Marx too it is not what people think they are
doing that drives history, but the economic activity in which they are engaged.
Genuine movement in history does not come from the action of individuals but
from the class to which they belong.
5. 20th-Century Reactions
For all these reasons a good case can be made for placing Marx alongside Hegel
as a thinker who develops a philosophy of history in the same grand or “classical”
style, in spite of the huge differences that must be recognized, at the level of con-
tent, between their theories. As we saw, for most of the 19th century Marx was
not, and did not intend to be, recognized as a philosopher at all in the academic
or systematic sense. Marx was known essentially as the leader of a political move-
ment that was not having much success, was splitting into factions, and seemed
unlikely, at the time of Marx’s death in 1883, to attain any great historical signifi-
cance in the political world.
This situation changed drastically in the early 20th century as one result of
the many upheavals issuing from World War I. The Bolshevik revolution in
Russia brought down the monarchy and succeeded in taking control of most of
the territory of the former Russian Empire. Under the leadership of Lenin the
Soviet Union was established as a state explicitly based on the ideas of Marx and
Engels. Further, the Bolshevik revolution initially presented itself, supposedly in
keeping with Marxist ideas, as a worldwide movement poised to spread from
Russia to the rest of Europe and the world. For the powers of Europe and the
Western world an obscure and ineffective political movement had now become
a major and threatening player on the world stage. For this reason alone, the
ideas of Marx had to be taken seriously in Western circles, first by the skeptical
and fearful politicians, and second by intellectuals, some of whom were inclined
to greet his ideas with interest because they were sympathetic to socialism as a
political movement.
With the discovery and publication of Marx’s early writings in the early 1930s
and after, a fuller picture emerged of Marx the thinker, very different from the
Marx of Soviet propaganda, based as it was in any case only on those publica-
tions, like the Manifesto and Capital, that had been available in the 19th century.
In particular, the full sense of Marx’s indebtedness to Hegel, and his connection
to the young, “left” Hegelians became clearer, something that had already been
argued by G. Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness (1923). Thus in West-
ern eyes Marx took his place belatedly as a “respectable” philosopher in the
Hegelian and post-Hegelian tradition, a development Marx himself would prob-
ably not have welcomed. This in turn led to a new assessment of Hegel himself in
light of his influence on Marx. Thus a tendency developed in the 1930s and after
to read Hegel through the eyes of Marx and vice versa. This happened in France
under the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, and in Germany through the
“Frankfurt School” of Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno.
From the perspective of our topic, this emerging “Western Marxism,” with its
strong Hegelian flavor, brought with it an interesting result. It tended to ignore
or downplay most of what we have described so far as Hegel’s and Marx’s “classi-
cal” philosophy of history. Just as the study of Marx focused now on his early
writings—The German Ideology (1844) and the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts (1845)—rather than the Manifesto (1848) and later works, so the
study of Hegel concentrated on his early Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) rather
than on the later works, including his lectures on the philosophy of history. Both
philosophers were in a sense being rescued, in the view of their new interpreters,
from the bad reputation and the bad company into which their later work had
led them. The late Hegel was associated, rightly or wrongly, with the Prussian
monarchy and the conservative reaction to the French Revolution; the late Marx
had been co-opted by the ideologues of the Soviet Union, which after the advent
of Stalin was already being viewed with skepticism and alarm even by Western
sympathizers. It was precisely the philosophy of history, as developed in the late
work of these two thinkers, which seemed now the most questionable aspect of
their work.
The end of World War II created a new situation in which to view the classical
philosophy of history. Hegel and Marx came under scrutiny by philosophers
who had no allegiance to the Frankfurt School or the French academic left. And
here it was precisely the philosophy of history in its “classical” form that became
the focus of criticism. One very influential book published during this period
(1949) was Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History. Löwith was a former student of
Heidegger’s living in exile in the United States, and he published his book in
English. The German version, which came out later, bore the more revealing title
Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen—world history and the event of salvation. It
was Löwith, as we noted earlier, who defined the philosophy of history as “a
systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by
which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ulti-
mate meaning.” After giving this definition, Löwith immediately states the thesis
of his book: “Taken in this sense, philosophy of history is, however, entirely de-
pendent on theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of his-
tory as a history of fulfillment and salvation. But then philosophy of history
cannot be a ‘science’; for how could one verify the belief in salvation on scientific
grounds?” (p. 1). Löwith thus implies that the modern versions of the philoso-
phy of history, since the introduction of the term by Voltaire, claim to be “sci-
ence” (presumably in the German sense of Wissenschaft), not theology or the
expression of religious belief. Löwith aims to show, on the contrary, that phi-
losophy of history “originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfil-
ment and that it ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern” (p. 2).
Löwith’s claim has become widely known as the “secularization thesis”: not that
modern times are secular as opposed to religious, but rather that the “classical”
modern philosophy of history is a secularized version of the theology of
history.
As we might expect, Löwith describes Hegel’s philosophy of history as a “sec-
ularization” of Christianity, with reason taking the place of faith and “realizing
the Kingdom of God on earth.” Hegel, after all, declares his allegiance to Christi-
anity quite openly, and hardly hides his attempt to use the philosophy of history
to reaffirm the basic elements of Christianity by other means. But it is these
“other means” that are crucial for Löwith: As we have seen, Hegel claims not to
have recourse to faith for the substantiation of his philosophy of history, holding
faith to be an inferior access to what can be known by reason alone. A second
aspect of Hegel’s secularization is that if “salvation” is the meaning and purpose
of history, it is meant to occur not in the afterlife or the Kingdom of Heaven
beyond history, but on earth and within history itself. Hegel’s belief in reason
over faith, and the notion that the fulfillment of history is to be constructed here
on earth, are ideas that Hegel takes over from the Enlightenment. But for Löwith
the basic plotline is still the salvation history of the Christian tradition.
Löwith sees in Marx the same jarring combination of elements as in Hegel:
the presentation as scientific truth of what is in essence a deeply religious mes-
sage: “Marx may explain the fact of exploitation ‘scientifically’ by his theory of
surplus value; exploitation, nevertheless, remains an ethical judgment.” In Marx’s
outline of universal history, exploitation is “the radical evil of ‘prehistory’ or, in
biblical terms, original sin.” “The secret history of the Communist Manifesto is not
its conscious materialism and Marx’s own opinion of it, but the religious spirit of
prophetism” (p. 43). Marx’s ultimate struggle between bourgeois and proletariat
“corresponds to the Jewish-Christian belief in a final fight between Christ and
anti-Christ in the last epoch of history.” The outcome of Marx’s “historical mes-
sianism” is communist society as a “realm of freedom,” “a Kingdom of God, with-
out God and on earth” (p. 4).
The modern philosophy of history in its most illustrious form is thus a secu-
larized version of the salvation story, religion masquerading as reason and sci-
ence. Löwith attempts to back up his thesis by tracing the modern conception of
history back to its theological (Augustinian) and biblical roots. Throughout his
presentation he contrasts this Judeo-Christian view of history with the Greek
conception, based on eternal recurrence and on the idea of Fate. He clearly be-
lieves that this non-religious conception, which dispenses with the idea of ulti-
mate purpose and of salvation, is not only more internally coherent but also
more in accord with our actual experience of time and events.
Löwith’s book must be understood at least partly as a document of its time.
His critique of the classical philosophy of history is moral as well as conceptual,
in light of the Holocaust and other mass sufferings as a result of the war. “The
interpretation of history,” he writes, “is, in the last analysis, an attempt to under-
stand the meaning of history as the meaning of suffering by historical action.”
This attempt to present a theodicy by means of history is the novelty of modern
thought, and its biggest mistake, according to Löwith. “Neither antiquity nor
Christianity indulged in the modern illusion that history can be conceived as a
progressive evolution which solves the problem of evil by way of elimination”
(p. 3). As we have seen, for Augustine the solution to the problem of evil lay not
in history but in the city of God, outside or beyond history. For the Greeks evil
was not even conceived as a problem for which there could be a solution. The
moderns can be understood as believing that suffering could be justified by the

higher purpose that was being served. But according to Löwith, “historical pro-
cesses as such do not bear the least evidence of a comprehensive and ultimate
meaning. History as such has no outcome” (p. 191).
Löwith’s indictment of the modern philosophers of history is that they are
guilty of illusion—or perhaps of self-deception on the nature of their project—
and of moral naiveté. A much harsher judgment is found in another document of
its time, Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, published in 1957. Popper
defines historicism as “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that
historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is at-
tainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns,’ the ‘laws’ or ‘trends’ that
underlie the evolution of history” (p. 3). Published in the early stages of the
Cold War, Popper’s book targets primarily Marx and Marxists, whom he thinks
of as social scientists—or would-be social scientists—rather than philosophers
of history. Hegel is barely mentioned, though Popper does evoke the idea of
“`spirits’—of an age, of a nation, of an army,” an idea with which Popper has “not
the slightest sympathy”—“neither with their idealistic prototype nor with their
dialectical and materialistic incarnations” (pp. 137–138). Thus Hegel is clearly
there in the background, as precursor to Marx. But like the term “historicism,”
which Popper defines in a way that has little to do with its various traditional
uses, the doctrine Popper designates by it is substantially constructed in toto
without much regard for the actual views, much less the texts or theories, of
Hegel, Marx, or Marxists. His book abounds with statements like this one: “his-
toricists, quite consistently with their belief that sociological experiments are
useless and impossible, argue for historical prophecy—the prophecy of social,
political, and institutional developments—and against social engineering, as the
practical aim of the social sciences” (p. 137). No source is given for this attribu-
tion of views, nor are any specific historicists mentioned in connection with
them. Reducing the doctrine he attacks essentially to the belief that historical
and social events are entirely scientifically predictable, Popper has no difficulty
demolishing this doctrine he himself has constructed.
Expressed in the neutral idiom of the philosophy of science, Popper’s critique
seems limited to the claim that what he calls historicism is simply bad science.
But it turns out that his book, like Löwith’s, has a moral message, though a very
different one. While Löwith reproaches the philosophers of history with naiveté
for thinking they could explain away evil by appealing to history, Popper holds
“historicism” itself responsible for evil in history. The passion and moral indig-
nation behind Popper’s book are found in its dedication: “In memory of the
countless men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell
victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical
Destiny.”
Despite the topical resonance and the moral reproach that hover around
Löwith’s and Popper’s critiques of the classical philosophy of history, both au-
thors agree in their assessment of its character at least to this extent: They both
portray the philosophy of history as an attempt, however misguided or dis-
guised, at a theoretical comprehension of the historical process as a whole and
the discovery of its meaning or ultimate purpose. Both see it, in other words, as
an attempt at “science” which goes astray, in the one case because it is claiming
something that can only be known by faith, in the other case because it makes
predictions that in principle cannot be substantiated. The problem is ultimately
conceptual.
Similar critiques were made by more mainstream analytic philosophers of
history, usually minus the moral-historical judgments that accompanied the
works we have just been discussing. Typically, as we have noted, philosophy of
history was dismissed as a variant of “metaphysical speculation” which attempted
to range far beyond our empirically warranted scientific knowledge. A more so-
phisticated critique is that of Arthur Danto in his Analytical Philosophy of History
(1965), based on an account of knowledge that is specific to history as a disci-
pline. After borrowing from Löwith, as we noted, the definition of what he
chooses to call the “substantive” philosophy of history (“a systematic interpreta-
tion of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events
and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning”), Danto
sets out to give conceptual reasons why the project of such a philosophy cannot
be completed. His reasons are connected, as we shall see, with the notion of
retrospection we encountered in Chapter II.
Danto asks, “How are we to understand this special use of the word ‘mean-
ing’?” (p. 8). It is different from asking for the meaning of a word or sentence, but
it is a quite common use of “meaning,” one that turns up in the context of stories.
In a novel, an episode or action may seem to “lack meaning” when it appears in
the story, but its meaning is revealed by later events. The same sense of “mean-
ing” or “significance” is ascribed to events that turn up in historical narratives.
The Tennis Court Oath and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand have his-
torical meaning or significance not somehow in themselves, but because of later
events to which they gave rise or contributed, namely the French Revolution
and the First World War, respectively. Thus “to ask for the significance of an
event, in the historical sense of the term, is to ask a question which can be
answered only in the context of a story” (p. 11). A historian tells the story of a
large-scale temporal event, like a battle, a war, or even larger events like the Re-
naissance or the Industrial Revolution, and other, smaller-scale events are in-
cluded in the story (just as many other events are excluded) because of their role
in the larger whole. It is from the latter that they get their significance and even,
in some cases, their very description. Further, “the identical event will have a
different significance in accordance with the story in which it is located or, in

other words, in accordance with what different sets of later events it may be con-
nected” (p. 11).
Thus the sense of “meaning” that turns up in the context of the substantive
philosophy of history is exactly the sense found in ordinary historical accounts,
and Danto affirms that the project of the substantive philosophy of history is
continuous with that of ordinary history, at least in the minimal sense that “sub-
stantive philosophers of history, like historians, are concerned to give accounts
of what happened in the past” (p. 1). Danto argues, nevertheless, that the sub-
stantive philosophy of history “is a misconceived activity, and rests upon a basic
mistake” (p. 14). Ordinary historical accounts find significance in events, and
thus include those events in their accounts, because they lead up to other, later
events that are also in the past—like the winning of the battle, the completion of
the war, etc. They belong, in other words, to larger temporal wholes that belong
to the past. According to Danto, the substantive philosopher of history wants to
find the ultimate meaning of events by relating them to the whole of history, in-
cluding the part that is still in the future. But “we cannot enjoy a cognitive stand-
point which makes such an activity feasible” (p. 15). We have no access to the
whole of history which would give us its ultimate meaning. Even the significance
the ordinary historian attributes to events in the past is always to some extent
provisional, since later events may reveal in them a meaning that was not avail-
able at the time the historian wrote. But the philosopher wants to look at events
as if from the perspective of the whole and, as it were, of the ultimate future.
Though he does not say so, Danto’s critique is especially appropriate to
Hegel’s philosophy of history. This should not surprise us, of course. In the style
typical of analytic philosophy, Danto has created an abstract project or under-
taking called the substantive philosophy of history, and even a generalized,
nameless “substantive philosopher of history,” but in fact he has the classical fig-
ures, Hegel and Marx, in mind. Danto is saying in effect that Hegel not only does
claim to be at the “end of history,” but in a sense must do so if he is to claim to
have found the ultimate meaning of events. The merit of Danto’s critique is that
he is able to say more than simply that Hegel and others claim to know more
than they can legitimately know. He gives reasons for saying this that are based
on our knowledge of history as embodied in stories about the past.
Thus we can see Löwith, Popper, and Danto, in the post-World War II period,
as delivering the death-blows, each from a slightly different angle, to the classical
philosophy of history. Whether as a hopeless attempt at theodicy, as misguided
and malevolent social science, or as unwarranted extension of history itself, the
philosophy of history is portrayed as confused and perhaps self-deluded about
the nature of its own project. As we have seen, the classical philosophers of his-
tory are attacked as making theoretical claims about the truth of history. In the
case of Hegel and Marx, not only did they present their views in this way, but
they even claimed the title of “science” for their theories. The very idea of discov-
ering the ultimate “meaning” or “purpose” or “significance” of the historical
process as a whole is seen by their critics as a doomed project which for very
important reasons cannot be carried out. The philosophy of history survives, in
name only, in its very different, “analytical” or “critical” form, as a branch of epis-
temology, much as the philosophy of science supplants the “philosophy of
nature”: just as legitimate knowledge of nature is the province of scientists, not
philosophers, so genuine knowledge of history is reserved for historians. Phi-
losophy’s only legitimate role is to examine the knowledge in each of these
domains. Periodical revivals of the classical project, in figures like Spengler,
Toynbee, and Fukuyama, are not taken seriously.
V
A Phenomenological Rereading
of the Classical Philosophy of History
1. Danto and the “Metaphysics of Everyday Life”

We indicated at the beginning that we intend to propose a new reading of the
classical philosophy of history, an interpretation which sees it less in theoretical
than in experiential and practical terms. If we are successful, our interpretation
will undercut many of the criticisms leveled at the classical approach by such
authors as Löwith, Popper, and Danto.
It turns out that Danto’s analysis of history and the philosophy of history,
with which we concluded the last section, can provide us with the means for re-
assessing the character and prospects of the classical philosophy of history. As
we have seen, Danto describes the project of the substantive philosophy of his-
tory (to use his preferred term) as being continuous with that of history itself.
The key concept in Danto’s analysis, indicating the activity in which both histo-
rian and philosopher are engaged, is that of narration, or story-telling. Ordinary
historians produce narratives of the events of the past, and so do philosophers of
history; but the latter depend for their account on an appeal to the whole of his-
tory which goes beyond what they can legitimately know. Danto’s purpose in his
1965 book, as its name implies, is not primarily to provide the means for a cri-
tique of the substantive philosophy of history, which comes early in the book,
but rather to engage in the analytic philosophy of history itself, and the concept
of narrative serves as the basis for his lengthy analysis of historical knowledge.
But according to his later assessment of his own book, Danto had stumbled on a
concept whose significance was much greater than he had thought.
Writing 20 years later, in a revised edition of his Analytical Philosophy of His-
tory, now called Narration and Knowledge (1985), Danto says he had learned that
“the structures that had concerned me as an analyst are indeed the structures of
philosophical consciousness as such. What finally emerges from this effort [of
the intervening years] is the instructive suggestion that narration yields certain
categories of thought that might be said to compose the metaphysics of everyday
105
life—a spontaneous and perhaps unrevisable philosophy that incorporates the

philosophies of knowledge, action, psychology and art that I have sought to
elaborate in the twenty years since Analytical Philosophy of History was pub-
lished” (p. xiv).
In my view Danto has come up with a very “instructive suggestion” indeed in
this passage, and I intend to examine several aspects of it. I want to explore what
it means to say that narrative yields categories that make up “the metaphysics of
everyday life”; I want to look at the sense in which this metaphysics is “sponta-
neous and perhaps unrevisable”; and I want to consider how such a metaphysics
might “incorporate” such things as “knowledge, action, psychology and art.” In
the course of taking up these questions, we will begin to see how narrative
might provide an understanding of the classical philosophy of history which
casts it in a new light and allows us to assess it in completely new terms, differ-
ent even from those used by Danto himself. What Danto calls the “metaphysics
of everyday life” is close to what we have been discussing under the broad title
of “experience.” In this chapter our discussion of experience will focus, more
than in previous chapters, on its narrative and practical character. At the end of
this chapter we will reflect on the connection between the concepts of narrative
and practice, on the one hand, and the broader concept of experience, on the
other.
In order to understand what Danto means with his new conception of narra-
tive it will be necessary to describe briefly what was happening to the concept of
narrative in the twenty years from 1965 to 1985. This will fill in some of the de-
tails behind our discussion of narrative representation in Chapter III. Danto was
certainly not the only one to recognize the importance of narrative, not only for
the philosophy of history but also for much more besides. But his treatment of it
is distinctive, at least within the analytic philosophy of history, and to some
extent marks a turning point.
A very minimal sense of narrative had turned up in 20th-century analytic phi-
losophy of history, usually in the context of distinguishing between a mere
“chronicle” and a full-blown historical account. Morton White (1965), for ex-
ample, writes: “The chronicler is likely to tell us: ‘The king of England died, and
then the queen of England died, and then the prince of England died, and then
the princess of England died. And there endeth our chronicle.’ But a correspond-
ing history may read: ‘The king of England died, so the queen of England grieved.
Her grief led to her death. Her death led the prince to worry, and he worried to
the point of suicide. His death made the princess lonely, and she died of that
loneliness. And so endeth our lugubrious history.’” A chronicle simply lists a
series of events in the order in which they happened, but according to White “a
history contains causal statements” (p. 223). Each event causes the next, and the
account tells us not just what happened but also why it happened. (Walsh [1960]
A P henomenol og ical R ereading o f the Cla s s i cal Phil os ophy o f Hi stor y 107
similarly distinguishes between “plain” and “significant” narrative.) By using nar-

rative to mean simply a causal explanation of a sequence of events, White is con-
tinuing the tradition inaugurated by Carl G. Hempel in the 1940s. Hempel’s
proposal (1942) was that history is like natural science in seeking to explain
events, and it does so in essentially the same way, by showing that they follow
deductively from general laws. By reducing historical explanation to scientific
explanation, at least in form, Hempel was pursuing the positivist unity-of-science
program. The important thing about this early use of narrative in the analytic
philosophy of history is that it was used to serve the purpose of making natural-
scientific explanation the model for historical accounts. In keeping with the
positivist program, scientific knowledge was the paradigm for all knowledge,
and the question was whether history could measure up and count as knowledge
at all.
Danto’s 1965 book marks a turning point because, though he thinks of him-
self as pursuing the positivist program (or so he said later; see Danto 1995), he
introduces a sophisticated concept of narrative explicitly modeled, as we’ve
seen, on literary narratives or stories. He is not alone in doing this: W. B. Gallie
had around the same time (1964) published a book on history whose premise
was that “history is a species of the genus ‘story’” (p. 66). With the work of
Louis Mink in the early 70s (collected in Mink 1987), the trend was well under
way to look at narrative as a “cognitive instrument” and history as “mode of
comprehension” (these are Mink’s terms) based on narrative. This work was ex-
plicitly in defiance of the positivist belief that if history were to have any value as
knowledge it must be like natural science. To be sure, Hempel’s positivist ap-
proach had already unleashed a lively reaction, starting in the 1950s, from au-
thors like Dray (1963), who insisted on the autonomy and distinctiveness of
historical explanation. Drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood (1999),
Dray argued that since history is interested mainly in human actions rather than
mere events, it explains actions appropriately by understanding their reasons
rather than giving their causes. This debate was in many respects a reprise of the
“explanation versus understanding” debate which had occupied 19th-century
German theorists dealing with the distinction between the Naturwissenschaften
and the Geisteswissenschaften. But it was conducted in an atmosphere where sci-
ence was largely seen the paradigm of real knowledge. Perhaps out of a desire to
minimize the “literary” aspect of history, the defenders of the autonomy of his-
tory did not invoke the concept of narrative at all, at least in this early phase of
the debate. By contrast, philosophers like Danto, Gallie, and Mink, in the 60s
and 70s, were looking at historical narrative quite explicitly from a literary point
of view.
In literary theory, of course, the study of narrative had a long tradition and
had produced a number of classic studies in the English-speaking world. And the
rise of French structuralist literary theory in the 1960s had also involved consid-
erable focus on narrative, drawing on the earlier work of theorists from Eastern
Europe like Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Propp. But literary theory and the
philosophy of history had little contact until the appearance of Hayden White’s
Metahistory in 1973. Drawing on the literary theories of both Northrup Frye
(1957) and Roland Barthes (1966), as we’ve seen, White produces a theory of
narrative in general which he then applied to history by examining the work of
both classical historians (Ranke, Michelet, Burkhardt) and philosophers of his-
tory (Hegel, Marx, Croce). White’s book was widely influential but also highly
controversial, especially among historians, since White seemed to be portraying
their work as guided by literary motives, or motifs, rather than by the project of
telling the truth about the past.
By this time the study of narrative was burgeoning on all sides, with a lot of
emphasis on the fact that narrative or story-telling is a cross-cultural and cross-
disciplinary phenomenon sui generis, turning up not only in history and fiction,
but also in films, folk-tales, medical case histories, psychotherapy, Attic friezes,
medieval altar paintings and tapestries, comic strips, court testimony, etc. Some
theorists proposed a new discipline, to be called “narratology,” which would
seek out the common features of narrative in all its manifestations. So when
Danto tells us in 1985 that he has discovered in narrative a significance much
broader than what he had envisaged in 1965, he certainly cannot claim that he
was the only one to do so, whether or not he was influenced by these other
developments.
2. Narrative and Everyday Life

The passage I quoted from Danto, however, taken together with certain features
of his analysis of narrative in Analytic Philosophy of History, indicates a distinctive
direction in the study of narrative that deserves to be pursued. Like many of the
theorists just mentioned, Danto acknowledges that narrative exhibits certain
structures that are found in many domains besides history and literature. But
unlike others, Danto implicitly asks why the same features should be found in so
many different cultures and in such widely diverse forms. His answer seems to
be that these features derive from a “spontaneous and perhaps unrevisable”
“metaphysics of everyday life.” What could this mean? Perhaps that there are
some basic features of human life or experience that find themselves expressed
in narrative form.
If we examine some of the features of narrative to which theorists have called
attention, we can begin to see how this might be so. Most stories are about
people and their actions and experiences. A story typically recounts a sequence
of events, experiences, or actions which unfold in time. Since Aristotle, it has

been noted that the events of a story are given unity in part by having a begin-
ning, a middle, and an end. Stories are further unified by having a central subject
or cast of characters who act, interact, and experience events. As Danto points
out, events get their place or their “meaning” within a story because of their sig-
nificance for later events; and the same can be said in reverse: Events recounted
later refer back to what has happened before. The end gives closure to the se-
quence of events, not merely in the temporal sense but rather in the sense that it
typically represents a resolution or response to a complication, conflict, or pre-
dicament which develops in the middle of the story. This is sometimes called the
“plot” of the story. The beginning is more than the temporal inauguration of the
action: It sets the stage, introduces the characters, and describes the situation
into which the complication or predicament is introduced. As has often been
pointed out, the development of a plot can be described abstractly in terms that
recall musical structure: departure and arrival, departure and return, suspension
and resolution. Thus the narrative is not just a temporal sequence but a temporal
configuration whose parts and relations point backward and forward to each
other in time as determined by their place in the whole.
There is more than this to the concept of narrative. A story has a story-teller
and an audience to whom the story is told. In fact, the features of narrative we
have discussed so far could be said to originate with the narrator. It is the narra-
tor who selects the events to be included in the story and arranges them in the
order in which they are told. The story-teller is the voice of authority in relation
to the audience: He knows how the story ends and because of this chooses
which events to include and which to exclude, which to reveal to the audience
and when. In relation to the characters in the story, too, the narrator is in a posi-
tion of superior knowledge: He knows the real as well as the intended conse-
quences of their actions, and many plots turn on this distinction. This leads
some theorists to posit three distinguishable points of view on the events in a
story: those of story-teller, audience, and characters.
Narrative theory has rung all the possible changes on this basic set of terms.
The events of the story may involve one or more crises or turning points, rever-
sals of fortune. We can distinguish the order of the events of the story from the
order in which they are told. One can narrate a story composed by someone else,
so we may distinguish the narrator from the author. In the case of jokes, folk-
tales, anecdotes, myths, one wonders whether the idea of an author makes sense.
The author may be distinguished from the narrator in another sense, namely that
the narrator may be a character in the story, or may have certain traits that are
merely implied in the story. To this “implied narrator” we can add an “implied
audience,” which may differ from the real audience. And just as the author may
be missing altogether, so may the narrator. A movie and a play tell stories, but
who is the narrator? The camera, perhaps? Much more can be and has been said
on these topics, but for our purposes these indications may suffice.
The question is: How may narrative structures be said to constitute a “meta-
physics of everyday life” in the sense that they contain basic features of human
life and experience? Telling stories and reading, hearing, and otherwise enjoying
stories, are of course activities in which most of us (though perhaps not all)
engage. But many theorists have stressed the sharp contrast between narrative
and everyday life. The latter may seem chaotic and unstructured, with no real
beginnings or endings, none of the satisfying resolutions we often find in stories.
In this sense narrative may seem if anything an escape from everyday life. Yet
everyday life is not a mere sequence either, not a meaningless succession of
events. We are not confined to the present moment, but remember what has oc-
curred and anticipate what is to come. As we saw in Chapter II, our experience is
a grasp which spans future and past, and the events we live through and experi-
ence belong to temporal configurations. This is what I argued in Time, Narrative
and History, and the following paragraphs reprise some of the arguments I made
there.
Everyday life, of course, is more than just passive experience; it is action as
well. And here the role of temporal configurations is even more striking. Our
own actions are events spread across time, and we don’t just live through or ob-
serve them, we perform them. In action we envisage the future, consult the past,
and arrange the present as the passage between the two. What we encounter in
the present has the significance as obstacle or instrument to our objectives. In
fact, we can see a close kinship between the beginning/middle/end structure of
narrative and the means/end structure of action. In both cases “end” is not
merely temporal but also teleological, and the same can be said for the related
concepts of middle and means. The beginning of an action is the situation per-
ceived by the agent, a divergence between what is the case and what is to be
done. This divergence constitutes a problem or predicament which is overcome
or resolved by the achievement of the end. We can thus see in action the same
abstract, quasi-musical structures we found in narrative: departure and arrival,
suspension and resolution, problem and solution. The comparison with music
reminds us, however, of something important: In narrative, as in experience and
action, a multiplicity of elements are organized according to principles that
make them more than a mere sequence of events. They can be analyzed in quasi-
logical terms. But like music, they are still temporal: They must be realized in
time in order to be what they are.
In fact the “logical” or teleological structure of action has a distinctive tempo-
ral character. The end to be achieved by the action, which is typically also its
temporal end, is what organizes the other phases of the action into the means,
steps, and stages to its realization. And it does this retrospectively, even prior to
its realization. Of course, strictly speaking we must say that it is the agent who
organizes the phases of the action by envisioning or projecting its end. The role
of the agent is thus both prospective and retrospective, or perhaps quasi-
retrospective, since the agent views the past and present as if looking back from
a point in the future not yet realized. But this lends to the agent a role not unlike
that of the narrator of a story, organizing the present by actively selecting, from a
range of possibilities, the means to employ in the realization of an end. Some-
times, in fact, we call this “plotting.”
Thus it is not only historians and novelists, and other narrators in the literal
sense, who view events in relation to later events, to use Danto’s version of narra-
tive; we all do it all the time in everyday life. It is true that we cannot achieve the
narrator’s after-the-fact, literally retrospective point of view, since we are in the
present at the mercy of unforeseen events. But the very essence of action is that
we try as far as possible to overcome this limitation and foresee as much as we
can. We try, with greater or less success, to occupy the story-teller’s position with
respect to our own actions. This is more than just a metaphor if we consider how
often, in the process of deliberating, planning, and carrying out an action, we tell
others, and sometimes ourselves, the story of what we are doing. Such story-
telling, whether explicit or merely implicit, is thus constitutive of the action, not
just an embellishment.
The kinship between narrative and action is manifested in the fact that the
three points of view we found associated with story-telling—narrator, character,
and audience—can be seen in action as well, at least implicitly. When we tell
ourselves the story of our own action we are at once the character who acts, the
narrator who tells the story, and the audience to whom the story is told. Action
can be seen as a process of telling ourselves stories, listening to those stories, and
acting them out. This feature is especially prominent in longer-term actions. We
designate as actions, after all, not merely things like going to the store for a loaf
of bread or building a bookshelf. To compete in a tennis tournament, to run for
election, to get an education, to write a book—these are all actions, though
sometimes we use the term project. And our performance of these actions not
only spans great periods of time, but it is also interrupted and intermittent, must
be set aside and taken up again and again, and maintained on course in spite of
unexpected intrusions and unforeseen circumstances. The practical role of nar-
rative here is to remind ourselves not only of “what we are doing,” in the sense of
what action we are involved in, but also of “where we are” in the action, what has
been accomplished so far and what still needs to be done.
We are beginning to get a sense, I think, of what Danto might mean by saying
that narrative constitutes the “metaphysics of everyday life.” Narrative, as it is
found in stories and histories, and in all the other exemplifications narrative
theorists talk about, exhibits a form that is to be found in everyday experience
and action, prior to and independently of its being told about explicitly. Perva-
sive as it is, story-telling, in the literal and perhaps literary sense, is not some-
thing we engage in all the time. But living, experiencing, and acting, and the
temporal form of existence they represent, are always there, whether we tell
about them or not. We can live and act without telling stories, but we cannot tell
stories without living and acting. Danto calls narrative the “metaphysics” and
even the “philosophy” of everyday life (indeed, not a philosophy but the philoso-
phy), but he also calls it “spontaneous and perhaps unrevisable.” Thus it is not
metaphysics or philosophy in the sense of a theory we arrive at by some reason-
ing. It seems to belong to our way of being in the world and being in time.
We thus come up with a very different picture from that proposed by Hayden
White and the structuralists he drew on. They were inclined to see narrative
structure as an a priori cultural form imposed on everyday life, an alien structure
which by its very nature distorted or misrepresented the messy and chaotic char-
acter of human life and action. Their model was fiction, and they saw narrative
originating in the literary imagination or the archetypical plot-structures em-
bedded in culture. As for history, which seeks to represent the past as it really
was, here narrative inevitably achieves the opposite effect, according to them. At
best it dresses up reality, reflecting our need for satisfying coherence, and, if we
really believe it, derives from wishful thinking. Far from reflecting reality, it es-
capes from it. At worst, narrative in its role as the “voice of authority” seeks to
put across a moral view of the world in the interests of power and manipulation.
Taken to this extreme, White’s view is skeptical not just about the classical phi-
losophy of history but about ordinary history as well, at least insofar as it takes
narrative form. This trend of thought coincided with certain tendencies among
historians, especially in France, where the major figures of the Annales school
were suspicious of narrative history and sought to shift the focus of history away
from human actions toward long-term economic, social, and geographical
phenomena.
But the skeptical view of narrative history, at least in the case of the structural-
ists, came from the fact that while they thought a lot about the structure of nar-
rative, they gave very little thought to the structure of everyday life. If they had
realized that narratives are not only about everyday life and action, but also re-
flect the structure of the very thing they are about, they would have had less
reason for skepticism. The commonsense view is that stories are not necessarily
fictional and misleading, that ordinary history is at least in principle capable of
rendering a truthful account of the past. If narrative history reflects the structure
of the human events and actions it is about, this does not of itself guarantee that
history is truthful. But its truthfulness is at least not ruled out in principle, as it is
according to the structuralist account. Narrative could then be seen as a “cogni-
tive instrument,” and history as a “mode of comprehension” (these are Mink’s
terms), which permits us to make sense of the past and thus to understand it and
know it, just as we use it to make sense of our own actions and those of others in
everyday life.
3. Practical Narrative
According to the commonsense view, narrative, in its standard explicit embodi-
ments, could be said to have either an “aesthetic” or a “cognitive” function. This
distinction overlaps with the distinction between fictional and nonfictional sto-
ries, though it is not identical with it. The latter distinction refers simply to the
fact that fiction relates events which, by definition, never happened, while non-
fiction deals with real events. But these two types of narrative may be said to
serve different functions. In fictional media like novels, plays, and films, it is used
to produce a work of art, or perhaps simply one of entertainment or diversion,
but in any case not something directly practical or something cognitive. It can
construct pleasing or aesthetically satisfying stories that are not constrained by
conforming to reality. In history or other cases of truth-telling stories (biogra-
phies, anecdotes, court testimony, etc.), narrative is thought of as an expression
of or means to knowledge of the past.
We are now in a position to see that, in addition to these two functions,
aesthetic and cognitive, and indeed at a deeper level prior to both, narrative is
practical in character. In fact, we can say that narrative is practical in two comple-
mentary senses. First, practice or action unfolds as a temporal configuration that
has a quasi-narrative structure: beginning/middle/end, means/end, suspension/
resolution, etc. Second, the quasi-narrating grasp of these elements, the story-
telling aspect of action, has the practical function of holding the action together
across time, organizing its parts, and doing so, if necessary, in the face of changing
circumstances. Thus prior to being a literary genre or a form of discourse, narra-
tive is above all what Wittgenstein (1964) called a form of life.
This sense of “life” suggests that there is an even deeper and broader sense in
which narrative is practical. It can be regarded as the organizing principle not
only for actions and experiences but also for the self who acts. There is an auto-
biographical aspect to the life even of those who never sit down to write their
biographies. Rather than a merely persisting metaphysical substance which suf-
fers the changing effects of time, like a thing in relation to its properties, the self
is the subject of a life-story which is forever being told and retold in the process
of being lived. Living one’s life, and telling its story to oneself as well as others,
are part of the same process. We are continually composing, revising, and acting
out our own biographies. Again the viewpoints of story-teller, protagonist, and
audience combine. Indeed, the ethical-practical problems of personal identity
and the coherence of one’s life may be seen as the problem of unifying these
roles. Such a proto-narrative provides the tenuous “thread of life” (see Wollheim,
1985) which at any moment draws together the past, present, and future phases
of one’s life and holds them together against their centrifugal tendency to frag-
ment and dissolve into incoherence.
We can think of narrative, then, in the broad senses described here, as a very
basic sort of life-activity which holds our experiences and actions together, and
even holds ourselves together. All these aspects of life need to be held together
because they are all complex unities, wholes composed of parts, and the parts
and wholes they compose are specifically temporal in character. The human way
of being in time is to span present, past, and future, experiencing and organizing
the present and the past in terms of an anticipated future. Narrative structures
transform natural time into human time; or as Paul Ricoeur (1984, p. 52) puts it,
“time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative
mode.” Narrative certainly provides the means for understanding others: We ex-
plain what a person is doing by telling a story of her action. And narrative per-
mits us to understand what or who another person is by learning his life-story.
But above all narrative is the way we understand ourselves. But here there is
more involved than just understanding, as if “who I am” is somehow fixed inde-
pendently and all I had to do was comprehend this pre-given self. Rather, narra-
tive in this ultimate, practical sense constructs the self, so to speak, as it goes
along.
4. Narrative and the Classical Philosophy of History

The question before us now is: Does the foregoing discussion of narrative, this
broader perspective on its role in relation to everyday life, offer us a new way of
looking at the classical philosophy of history? Let us assume that, as Danto sug-
gests, the classical philosophers are “telling stories” about historical events, just
as historians are, but on a larger scale. The question is: What is the status of those
stories? What role do they play, what function do they serve as narratives? Must
we assume that their function or status is the same as that of standard histories?
We spoke of the distinction between the “cognitive” and the “aesthetic” roles
of narrative, which, as we saw, overlaps with the distinction between fictional
and nonfictional stories. To which does the classical philosophy of history
belong? Since it deals with real rather than fictional events, it has always been
considered a cognitive endeavor, at least in intent. Its aim in telling stories about
the past, or rather about the whole of history, is to understand its object, to tell
us the truth about what really happened. In this respect, as Danto suggests, it
seems continuous with standard history.
According to its critics, it is precisely this intent that gets it into trouble. It lays
claim to a kind of knowledge that it cannot deliver. And what is more, at least
according to some of its critics, the primary reason for this is that it fails to ob-
serve the distinction between the cognitive and the aesthetic. While claiming
knowledge of the real, it employs standards and principles that are appropriate
only to the unreal realm of fiction. In search of a satisfying and well-rounded
story to tell about the whole of human history, it constructs an account that is
not constrained by reality, and the result is more fictional than historical. This is
essentially the criticism of both Danto and Hayden White. For Danto, the phi-
losopher takes as his organizing principle an endpoint that is not available to him
and builds a story around it. Hayden White’s formal analysis of Hegel’s philoso-
phy of history has similar features. According to White, Hegel first emplots the
course of history in terms of irony and tragedy, stressing the struggle of points of
view, the “panorama of sin and suffering”—that is, the suffering of the good and
the triumph of the wicked, the failure of human passions to attain their ends. But
then this tale of tragedy is enveloped and taken up into the Christian “divine
comedy” in which Creator and Creation are fully reconciled (White 1973,
pp. 126–127). Again the goal of freedom for all gives retrospective meaning to
the tragic events of history, elevating them to a different plane and providing
them with a sense they could not have had for those involved.
Thus White argues that the philosopher follows rules of story-telling that
originate in fiction and applies them where they do not belong. To be sure, as
we’ve seen, for White this description applies to the historian as well as the
substantive philosopher of history, so he is in the end just as skeptical about
history proper as he is about the philosophy of history. Unlike Danto and
others he sees no legitimate, truth-telling role for narrative outside the domain
of fiction. But the source of the problem for both history and philosophy is the
use of essentially aesthetic structures in domains where they do not belong.
The most obvious form of this is that of the happy ending, where good tri-
umphs over evil. One can see how this analysis might seem especially applica-
ble to some of the classical philosophers of history such as Hegel and Marx, and
even to their more explicitly theological predecessors. There could be no
happier ending than that of the historical theodicy in which good triumphs
definitively over evil, for all time, for all of history. We can see how this sort of
critique of the classical philosophy of history merges with that of Löwith, even
though the latter does not make use of the concept of narrative in his own
analysis.
In sum, to the critics of the classical philosophy of history, narrative must be
either cognitive or aesthetic, and philosophers like Hegel and Marx have pro-
duced narrative accounts of the whole of history that they think are cognitive but
are in fact merely aesthetic.
But as we have seen, there is a third alternative to the cognitive and the aes-
thetic functions of narrative. Suppose that, in the works of the classical philoso-
phers of history, narrative had a practical function instead. What would this
mean? In keeping with what we have said about the practical aspect of narrative,
telling a story in this sense, whether implicitly or explicitly, whether to others or
to oneself, is a matter of organizing and understanding the present and the past
in order to achieve some end. The narrative “sets the stage” by identifying the
gap between the present situation and the end to be achieved, and it lays out the
means and the steps and stages required to accomplish the transition from the
one to the other. Can narrative accounts of history, of the sort we encounter in
the works of the philosophers, be construed in this way?
5. Narrative and the Social

A major obstacle to this proposal might be seen in the fact that we have identi-
fied the practical aspect of narrative with “everyday life,” with the organization of
short- and long-term actions, and with the quasi-autobiographical organization
of a life. When one thinks of actions in these terms, one thinks of one’s own ac-
tions, and the life one thinks of is again one’s own. In other words, the narrative
interpretation of action seems appropriate to the individual, and to the practice
of achieving individual goals and shaping the individual life. The classical phi-
losophy of history, by contrast, in the authors we have discussed, is dealing with
“world history,” “history as a whole.” How can the structure of practical narrative
be projected onto so large a canvas? What sense can we make of actions and
goals, means and ends, for world history as a whole?
Of course, ordinary history is itself rooted in narrative, as we’ve seen, and the
stories it tells are not individual stories. Historical accounts concern themselves
typically with larger social units such as nations and peoples, with social events
and phenomena such as wars, slavery, revolution, industrialization. Individuals
play a role, of course, but historians tell stories about them only if their lives and
actions are important for the societies they belong to. Thus leaders—kings,
popes, generals, etc.—may occupy historians. Or again, quite ordinary individu-
als may figure in historical accounts, but their stories are included only because
they typify or exemplify broad trends and social phenomena. But histories are
not really about them, they are about the French Revolution, the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire, the waning of the Middle Ages, etc. As these titles indi-
cate, the “central subject” about which these stories are told are large-scale social
entities or large-scale social events.
Thus if one can tell a story about a war or an empire, then why not about his-
tory “as a whole”—which generally means about mankind as a whole? The genre
of “world history” exemplified by H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, after languish-

ing for many years and being regarded with some suspicion, has made a come-
back in recent times as a respectable sub-discipline within history as a whole,
and it makes no pretentions to be anything like a philosophy of history. The ap-
propriateness of narrative in ordinary history seems not to be affected by the
scale of the object—or subject—of the story.
But in ordinary history narrative is employed in the cognitive mode. The
problem with finding something in the practical mode at this level is that the
practical function of narrative seems to have a necessarily first-person character.
We were able to describe the story-telling character of action by describing the
agent’s formulation, articulation, and execution of the agent’s own action, from
the agent’s own point of view. This was the reason we confined ourselves to a
discussion of individual action. The idea of action, or more broadly practice,
seems inevitably linked to individuals. Only individuals act, it seems; groups do
not. We have to choose, according to this analysis, between a first-person action
performed by an individual, or a social phenomenon or event described from a
third-person perspective. At most the two perspectives could come together in
the action of some “great man” or “world-historical individual” who makes his-
tory by his or her individual action.
But this analysis overlooks something important about social phenomena
and social existence, something we have already discussed in Chapter II. Groups
do act, or at least we attribute action to them all the time. Nations, social clubs,
groups large and small, not only act but also deliberate, make decisions, have
intentions, plan for the future, etc. Or so we say. Are there really such collective
actions, performed by collective subjects, or is this just shorthand for the actions
of individuals? We enter here into an old debate in social theory between holists
and reductionists. In fact, it brings us into proximity with concepts first devel-
oped, in the era of the classical philosophy of history, by some of the authors we
have considered. Rousseau’s “volonté générale” develops into the “spirit of a
people” that we find in Herder and then Hegel, and another version appears in
Marx’s idea of class. Many people object to these notions because they consider
them myths or fictions that have been put to dangerous use in the political realm
by individuals wielding power in the service of totalitarian ideologies. In other
words, such collective entities are the inventions of those who wish to subvert
and suppress the wills of individuals by making them think they must conform
to a larger force that is stronger than they. People must be convinced that if they
do not submit to this superior entity they will be trodden underfoot, relegated to
the scrap-heap of history.
There is, however, a more benign and plausible sense of collective agency
that is much closer to everyday experience. As we saw in Chapter II, the collec-
tive agent need not be an alien and superior subject opposed to me or imposed
upon me; it may simply be a group to which I belong. It would then be not
some entity observed from outside, but something I experience from within in
virtue of my membership and participation. In this case we need not give up the
first-person perspective at all, but just to take up its plural rather than its singu-
lar form. There are many actions in which I participate, but whose proper sub-
ject is not I but We. There is more than a grammatical point here: We are think-
ing of collective and cooperative actions of a certain sort, not all actions which
take “we” as their subject. For example, if some friends and I go shopping, we
may say “we” go shopping, but this may simply mean that I do my shopping,
you do yours, she does hers, etc. But if we build a house, to use our earlier ex-
ample, this does not mean that I build the house, you build the house, etc. Here
the concept of division of labor enters in, such that each individual may per-
form a particular task, one which gets its significance by the role it plays in the
common project.
The consideration of the first-person plural or we-subject opens up a
whole new description of social existence and action. The concepts of mem-
bership and participation allow us to consider experience and action from
the participant’s perspective. Social groups need no longer be viewed as
third-person phenomena. And indeed, when we adopt this perspective we
find many parallels to our previous descriptions of the temporal features of
action. To engage in a common action is to organize a temporal succession of
phases into steps and stages, sub-projects, means and ends. Here again we
may speak of a narrative structure, not only because the action exhibits the
same sort of temporal closure and configuration that we find in an individu-
al’s action, but also because this structure is made possible by something
comparable to a narrative voice. The temporal sequence must be held to-
gether by a prospective–retrospective grasp which gives to its phases their
sense of contributing to a common goal.
And what of the three roles involved in story-telling? Who is the narrator
here, who is the agent, and who is the audience to whom the story is told? In one
sense, of course, the answer is: We are. We tell ourselves the story of our action
and we act it out. But there is another option here made possible by the plurality
of the group. Just as parts of the project are divided among members of the
group, so may the roles of narrator, audience, actor, etc. More precisely, certain
individuals, or even one individual, may speak on behalf of the group, articulat-
ing for the others what “we” are doing. This is of course the role of leadership.
The resulting “story” must of course be believed or accepted by the audience to
whom it is addressed if its members are to play the role of characters in the story
that is being told.
We can take this analysis a step further, based on what we said earlier about
narrative. It provides the organizing principle, we said, not only for experiences
and actions, but also for the self which acts. As the unity of many actions and
experiences, the self is constituted as the subject of a life-story, a repeatedly re-
vised autobiographical narrative. So too for certain kinds of groups which out-
live particular common experiences and actions to acquire a stable existence
over time. Not all groups are of this sort, but those whose members refer to
themselves as “we” may be said to constitute—or to constitute themselves as—
what we call “communities” and to achieve the status of collective entities of a
special kind. Examples would be family, ethnic and religious groups, as well as
political entities like modern nation-states. Here again the narrative has a practi-
cal function: It holds the community together over time. Like the life-story of
the individual, this narrative may preserve the memories of the group’s origins in
legends, traditions, monuments, public buildings, folk music and art. This is
behind the familiar notion of history as “society’s memory.” As memory is to the
individual, and to the individual’s identity and sense of self, so is history to the
community. Especially in its more popular forms, history is the autobiography a
community writes for itself.
While it is true that this large-scale social narrative may be told by only a few
or even by one member of the group, it must be addressed to all, told on behalf
of all, and be largely accepted by all if it to have the constitutive function we de-
scribe. And it is important to stress this notion of “constitutive”: The communi-
ty’s life-story or autobiography, in the sense described here, is not a story about
something that exists independently of that story. The community exists in the
telling and retelling and above all in the acceptance of the story by its members,
as well as in their participation in common actions. This communal existence is
always to some extent precarious and fragile and it is always under construction
and reconstruction. And it concerns the future as well as the past. Indeed, be-
cause it is practical, this narrative is primarily oriented toward the future. Like
the individual, the community faces the possibility of its own demise or, in this
case, fragmentation. To assure its continued existence it must, like the individ-
ual, make choices and take decisions.
Story-telling, of the sort we have been describing in general terms, be-
comes explicit in the rhetoric of community leadership, especially political
leadership. The political leader invariably presumes to speak in the name of
the community, and the “we” is the dominant rhetorical device. He or she may
be telling the story, but it is “our” story that is being told. Such has been the
practice of the great orators from Pericles and Cicero to Abraham Lincoln and
Martin Luther King, Jr. And the narrative quality of such oratory is to be
found everywhere. As we noted in Chapter II, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address of
1863 is exemplary. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth
on this continent a new nation,” says Lincoln. “Now we are engaged in a great
civil war, testing whether that nation . . . can long endure.” Thus, speaking on
our behalf, he accounts for the meaning of a collective action by placing it in

the middle of a story with a past and a future: a myth of origin or foundation,
and the glimpse of a future placed in jeopardy by a present crisis or turning
point.
As Gary Wills (1992) reminds us in his brilliant analysis of Lincoln’s ad-
dress, this speech was political in another sense often forgotten when it is
memorized and recited by schoolchildren. On the surface the purpose of the
speech is clear: “It is for us the living . . . to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work.” The war was still going on, and it must be won so that the great experi-
ment, begun by the founding fathers, shall not fail, so that “government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” But ac-
cording to Wills, Lincoln’s rhetoric has a deeper and more radical purpose: a
recasting of the nation’s past. Not the Constitution of 1787, which empha-
sizes confederation and states’ rights, but the Declaration of Independence of
1776, is the founding document of the United States. This document, “dedi-
cated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” permits Lincoln an
oblique reference to the slavery question. But even more important, says
Wills, Lincoln believed that in the Declaration “Americans had constituted
themselves a single people long before the constitution was drafted or rati-
fied” (p. 129). Thus it was not the states that created the union; the people as
a whole came first. This gives a completely different sense to the Constitution,
Wills says. Lincoln “altered it from within, by appeal from its letter to the
spirit” (p. 38). As Wills puts it dramatically: “Lincoln had revolutionized the
Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their
future indefinitely” (p. 38).
Lincoln’s use of narrative is thus political not merely in the sense that it seeks
to unify people and orient them toward a particular goal. It also shows how
control of the narrative and the reinterpretation of the past play a role in strug-
gles between different factions or points of view. The past, of course, is anything
but fixed. It is frequently rewritten and subtly—or not so subtly—manipulated
for political purposes. It is often the issue between conservatives and progres-
sives. Is the past a golden age from which we have fallen away? Then we must
return to the values of our fathers. Or is it merely the first step toward a goal as
yet unrealized? Then we must continue to move toward the future. But both
scenarios involve not only the past but the future as well. Thus it is the whole
story, not just the past or the future alone, which is at issue. The community
exists so long as the basic storyline is generally accepted, and the story allows
for a certain amount of divergence of interpretation. If interpretations get too
far apart, of course, the group dissolves or fragments, as the American Civil
War, and many other cases of secession and political, social, and religious
schism show.
6. The Project of Rereading

We now have a better sense of narrative as what Danto called the “metaphysics of
everyday life.” We can see the rudiments of narrative structure, or a kind of im-
plicit story-telling, in the everyday action and experience of the individual, and
in the formation, maintenance, and development of personal identity or self-
hood. More important, given our concern with history, we have seen the same
structures at work in the social sphere, in the organization of collective experi-
ence and action, and ultimately in the formation and maintenance of group
identity as well.
We are now in a position to apply this analysis to the great theories of the clas-
sical philosophy of history. What would this application look like? This is the
question to which we shall devote this concluding section.
We shall begin with a few general points and concerns. First, the application
we propose would involve a reinterpretation of the mode or register in which
these theories are put forth. We would have to try to understand them not as
metaphysical claims about the reality of the historical process, but as a kind of
discourse more appropriately compared with the political-rhetorical kind of
story-telling we discussed in the last section. In other words, as we’ve said, we
would have to read them as narratives whose role is neither cognitive not aes-
thetic, but practical. To the extent that their theories involve reference to an end-
point or conclusion of the historical process, we would have to think of these
philosophers not as predicting such an outcome but rather, through their own
activity as philosophers, working to bring it about.
This is not to say, however, that their discourse is prescriptive rather than de-
scriptive in character. This would be a misleading oversimplification of the practi-
cal aspect of their narratives. What they give us, after all, is a story that includes
the past and the present as well as the future. The past, of course, cannot be
prescribed, nor can the present; so a large part of the narrative is still descriptive
in character. But the description is tailored to fit the larger story, and this may
require that present and past be described in a new way. Thus we can say that
they are being redescribed, and indeed that redescription is a large part of what
goes on here.
Another general point concerns the scale or scope of the philosophy of his-
tory in its classical forms. Whatever else it is, this philosophy has always pre-
sented itself as an account not limited to any particular stretch of history or to
any particular state, region, or people; it claims to be an account of “history as a
whole,” “universal history,” or “world history.” Action and practice, even consid-
ered at the social and political levels, are still describable as particular actions, no
matter how sweeping their scope. Fighting wars, undertaking revolutions, and
other such collective actions are still particular events. What is more, such
actions are performed by particular social agents, even if these are collective
agents like communities or other “we”-subjects. Any reinterpretation of the phi-
losophers’ historical narratives in practical terms will have to consider whether
the narrative structures we have considered so far are really applicable at such a
scale. In other words, if such an application is to work, our account must find in
these classical theories something that corresponds to the types of action and
the sorts of agents that we found in our earlier examples.
7. Marx and Marxists

Is it possible to read the classical philosophers of history in this way? In fact, this
was the approach of the “Western Marxists,” mentioned earlier, who emerged in
Europe before and after the Second World War. Turning their attention away
from Marx’s later writings, his collaborations with Engels, and the official Soviet
version of Marx’s thought, they found ways of taking Marx seriously without ac-
cepting the standard reading of his philosophy of history. In their view Marx’s
account of past history, and the present situation as he described it, were ways of
setting the stage for political organization and action. Rather than a theoretical
account of how history unfolds and where it is inevitably heading, Marx’s ac-
count is a blueprint of the social forces that must be understood if concrete steps
are to be taken toward the realization of a desired outcome. This interpretation,
inspired by attention to Marx’s early writings, can also be applied to later works
like the Communist Manifesto.
On this view, Marx’s account of history could be said to stem from an analysis
of what is wrong with the present state of affairs and what needs to be done to
correct it. His originality lies in shifting the focus of political critique away from
the discourse of democratic participation in social decisions and toward under-
lying material conditions. The idea of class results from viewing political realities
as based on the economic substructure of the ownership of the means of pro-
duction rather than on “abstract” notions of freedom. This allows Marx to look
beyond the constitutional arrangements of the existing nation-states of Europe
and to discern the conditions shared by the working class across national bound-
aries. Understanding the situation of European countries in the 19th century in
terms of class struggle calls forth an account of how the class struggle came to its
present pass. The familiar historical background of the overthrow of the feudal-
ism, the attack on the monarchies, and the rise of modern constitutional states is
now seen in a completely new light. The French Revolution is not the triumph
of human freedom but the triumph of a particular class, the bourgeoisie; this
coincides with and contributes to the beginnings of capitalism and the Indus-
trial Revolution. This in turn generates the new working class of the modern
industrial states. The Communist Manifesto (Marx 1998) is devoted primarily to

telling this story.
Engels projects this framework back into history, describing “every historical
epoch” in terms of the organization of the means of production, and character-
izing the “whole history of mankind” as a history of the struggle between ex-
ploiting and exploited classes. This sets the stage for the idea of a revolution in
which the class struggle is overcome for good because the disparity between
productive forces and the ownership of the means of production would no
longer exist. The result is a narrative of the unfolding and indeed the conclusion
of history, but its function is to motivate a certain kind of political action by
giving it a place within a coherent story.
It is easy enough to read Marx’s philosophy of history in this way because, as
we have noted, he thought of himself more as a reformer and activist than as a
philosopher. Indeed, he famously contrasted his role with that of the philoso-
phers, who had only “interpreted the world in various ways.” The point is to
change it, he said. That is the point of the Communist Manifesto, which ends with
a stirring call to arms: “workers of all countries, unite!” But changing the world,
for him and for Engels, required telling a story that would make sense of the
change. This story takes the form of a narrative that is neither cognitive nor aes-
thetic, but practical.
This interpretation of Marx’s philosophy of history also makes it possible to
address the well-known paradox that has always dogged the understanding of
the Marxist view of history: If the outcome of history is determined by inexora-
ble laws, where is the need for political action and revolutionary politics? Deter-
minism should inspire fatalism and quietism, not activism. Marx may have
thought to address this difficulty when he wrote that though the outcome is in-
evitable, it is possible to “shorten its birthpangs,” which would presumably be
accomplished by acting sooner rather than waiting for things to happen later.
But this still undercuts the notion of historical inevitability by making the course
of history dependent after all on human actions and choices. A theory of histori-
cal determinism with an inevitable outcome makes much more sense as a rhe-
torical device used by a political movement to produce a “bandwagon” effect on
its followers, urging them to jump aboard or risk being left behind and consigned
to the scrap-heap of history.
Considered as a narrative in the practical sense, with a predicament or prob-
lem to be addressed by action, Marx’s account of history has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. It also has a central subject or protagonist, the proletariat. In
spite of Marx’s rejection of the “idealist” background and his pretension to a
strictly “scientific” theory, he portrays the proletariat as both suffering and even-
tually collectively acting. This class is portrayed by Engels, as we’ve seen, as the
culmination of a history of class struggle, a class whose emancipation will “once
and for all” emancipate “society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class
distinctions and class struggles.” Thus the proletariat is not so much a particular
group or community as a universal subject which represents the aspirations of
mankind as such. Perhaps mindful of their own bourgeois origins, Marx and
Engels do not employ the “we” when calling on the proletariat to unite. But they
do say that “a portion of the bourgeoisie,” “who have raised themselves to the
level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole,” “goes
over to the proletariat” (Marx p. 13). Their message is that as the universal class,
the proletariat stands in for all of us. So, implicitly and indirectly, “we” are all part
of this struggle. Thus all the features of practical story-telling are preserved even
though Marx’s story encompasses all people and all history.
8. Hegel’s Lectures Again

Let us now return to Hegel’s philosophy of history which, we have argued, has
always served as the paradigm for the classical philosophical approach to history.
We propose to look at it with the structures of practical narrative in mind. It may
seem difficult initially to discern these structures in Hegel’s text, especially if we
begin where we just concluded our discussion of Marx, with the idea of the cen-
tral subject or protagonist. One of the most striking and, to some, troubling fea-
tures of Hegel’s account is the role accorded to spirit, or more precisely world
spirit, in the course of history. There is no doubt that Hegel’s account of history
has a central subject or protagonist, and this is it: the world spirit. Moreover, the
term “Geist” suggests subjectivity and agency—certainly more so than the
notion of “class” in Marx—and Hegel indeed attributes to spirit activity, inten-
tions, thought, and, of course, reason.
But one of the reasons this notion is found troubling—as well as unconvinc-
ing—is that this protagonist seems to operate completely on its own, marching
through history according to its own plan, not only oblivious to but seemingly
contemptuous of the thoughts, needs, desires, and interests of individuals in his-
tory. Even those giants Hegel calls world historical individuals—Caesar, Alexan-
der the Great, Napoleon—are in the end nothing but unwitting tools, used by
the world spirit in pursuit of its own ends. If a story is being told here, it seems to
be about something—or someone—that is remote from and even alien to the
lives of ordinary individuals. By contrast, part of the notion of practical narrative
is the communal “we”-subject with which one can identify, denoting a group to
which one belongs and in whose action one participates. This may seem plausi-
ble in the case of Marx’s proletariat, but does it work with Hegel’s world spirit?
In order to answer this question it is necessary to look more closely at the
important notion of spirit (Geist) and its function in Hegel’s thought. The
world spirit (Weltgeist) is important, but it is not the only spirit among the dra-
matis personae of the lectures on the philosophy of history. According to one
passage, the world or universal spirit is the result of the activities of V
olksgeister—
national spirits or spirits of a people, which are moments or phases which make
it up. And these in turn result in each case from the development of a people.
“A people,” Hegel writes, “goes through a series of stages [Bildungsstufen] until
it reaches the one which is the universal stage of its spirit” (Hegel 1988, p. 81).
The key to the understanding of the world spirit is going to lie in the under-
standing of these stages and what it means to go through them.
At this point in the lectures Hegel’s description is very sketchy. He says that
a particular form of spirit “does not merely pass away naturally in time, but
is negated [aufgehoben] in the self-activating, self-reflecting activity of self-
consciousness” (p. 81). This process is both a “preservation and a transfiguration
[Erhalten und Verklären].” Spirit is the “result of its own activity: its activity is the
transcending of what is immediately there, by negating it and returning into itself ”
(p. 82). These passages recall Hegel’s description of history as the spirit’s “hard
and endless struggle against itself,” its “self-estrangement,” which is not the “harm-
less and peaceful progress” that we find “in the realm of organic life” (p. 59).
“Spirit, within its own self, stands in opposition to itself. It must overcome itself as
its own truly hostile hindrance” (pp. 58f). But these brief references to the well-
known “dialectical” movement of history (Hegel does not use the term himself, at
least not here) remain tantalizing because Hegel does not relate them concretely
to what he describes as the broad movements of the world spirit in history.
We should note that in the lectures the term “Geist” is first introduced on its
own: not, that is, as part of the complex forms Volksgeist and Weltgeist. Hegel
begins with the broad distinction between spirit and nature (p. 19), or spirit and
matter (p. 20), and says that he wants to put forward some “abstract” features of
spirit before going on to its “most concrete” embodiments in history. These de-
scriptions are abstract, then, in the sense that they apply to all instances of spirit,
whether at the level of peoples, states, etc. Here Hegel mentions self-conscious-
ness, self-knowledge, and self-sufficiency, having its center (sein Mittelpunkt) in
itself, being by itself (bei-sich selbst-sein). These are summed up in the notion of
freedom, which is the “essence,” the “only truth” of spirit (p. 20). But again these
general descriptions are not related to the dialectical movement of self-opposi-
tion and self-negation described elsewhere.
9. Philosophy of History and the Phenomenology of Spirit

This produces in the text of the lectures a kind of disconnect that has driven
many commentators to look elsewhere in Hegel’s work in order to fill in the gaps.
The favorite choice (e.g., McCarney 2000 and Kojève 1969) has been the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit of 1807, a difficult work which can, at least in part, be itself
read as a philosophy of history. A passage in the lectures, following those quoted
above in which the “abstract” concept of spirit is introduced, points us toward
the Phenomenology: “According to this abstract definition, we can say of world
history that it is the exhibition [Darstellung] of the spirit, the working out of the
explicit knowledge of what it is potentially. Just as the germ of the plant carries
within itself the entire nature of the tree . . . , so the first traces of spirit virtually
contain all history” (p. 21). It is this reference to the “first traces of spirit” which
sends us to the Phenomenology, since there the spirit is shown to arise for the first
time out of more basic elements.
In the text of the Phenomenology itself, Hegel uses the term “Geist”—the true
subject, after all, of the Phänomenologie des Geistes—for the first time in a passage
which introduces a section entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-
Consciousness; Lordship and Bondage [Herrschaft und Knechtschaft].” This
section is probably the most famous and most quoted and commented-upon
section in the Phenomenology. It can be and has been read in many ways: as a
description of psychological or interpersonal relations, of social and political
dynamics, of historical developments, or even merely as a description of the in-
ternal relation of individual consciousness with itself. Perhaps it is all these at
once. But a couple of its features make it especially useful for understanding
Hegel’s philosophy of history, and for our interpretation in particular. First, it is
clearly the description of a three-fold process, development, or progression, and
Hegel seems to be saying that Geist is generated or constitutes itself out of this
process. It culminates in mutual recognition and reconciliation. Thus we are
likely to find here an exemplary account of what Hegel means by Geist, a term
that has a prominent role in his philosophy of history. Second, when he intro-
duces the term “Geist,” Hegel describes it in terms that are familiar to us, namely
as “an I that is We, a We that is I” (Hegel 1952, p. 140). Hegel’s concept of Geist,
then, seems to reflect or incorporate the very notion of the first-person plural
that is central to our account of practical narrative.
The idea of Geist emerging out of a social process, rather than simply existing
on its own, renders the concept less impersonal, more directly connected with
individuals, than the exalted Spirit we encounter in the philosophy of history. It
may be that in the lectures Hegel is simply presupposing the development, de-
scribed in laborious detail in the Phenomenology, by which spirit comes into ex-
istence; he takes for granted its existence in the world, and goes on from there.
Thus lying behind the full-blown concept of Geist is a whole story of its origins
that the audience of the lectures is not being told.
As we saw in Chapter I, phenomenology is called the science of the experi-
ence (Erfahrung) of consciousness. Experience in Hegel’s sense is the process by
which consciousness encounters the world, then reflects on itself in relation to

the world, largely as a result of its own error and misunderstanding. Conscious-
ness thus transforms itself into self-consciousness. At this point Hegel is still
operating at the level of the same first-person singular standpoint shared by his
precursors in early modern philosophy. Like them he sees that the genuine prob-
lem of this standpoint is how to transcend the isolation of the individual; but for
Hegel this transcendence is conceived not primarily as the relation to the “exter-
nal world” of nature, but as the relation to the other I. By becoming self-
conscious, the subject gets a sense of itself as independent of the nature world;
but the appearance of the other I challenges that independence. And for Hegel
this is not just a philosophical problem but a social and practical problem as well.
His account becomes the description of the struggle of the self-conscious sub-
ject for its own independence.
This is the description, centered on the concepts of mastery and servitude
(Herrschaft und Knechtschaft), that has been probably the most celebrated and
most influential of Hegel’s writings. At its most primitive, the struggle for inde-
pendence, in the face of the challenge of the other, can be a struggle to the death.
To risk one’s life, Hegel suggests, is to know that what counts is not just exis-
tence, but independent existence (p. 144). Eliminating the challenger, however,
can be curiously unsatisfying: For the winner, independence is achieved, but
there is no one left to acknowledge it. The loser, of course, achieves nothing, not
even existence. Hegel’s analysis here reveals the first mistake: In the struggle, the
issue is not just survival, factual existence, but the right to exist, and a right is
valid only if it is recognized as such.
In the face of this situation, the combination of dominance and servitude can
seem an attractive alternative for both parties to the struggle. The loser at least
keeps his life, choosing survival over independence; the winner gains not only
independence but, seemingly, recognition as well. The servant’s acknowledg-
ment of the master’s domination is expressed in the labor he must perform. But
the relation of dominance and servitude turns out to be just as unstable and un-
satisfying as the struggle it replaced. Once again, what it actually achieves is dif-
ferent from what it is meant to achieve, and it is likewise built on an error. The
master’s right to rule receives only an impoverished acknowledgment, because
the servant, reduced by force to an extension of the master’s will, provides only
a coerced, not an independent, recognition. The servant in turn, remaining self-
conscious through the constant fear for his own life, realizes the power of his
own labor and the superfluousness of the master in providing for human needs.
The resulting situation, fraught with tension, can be not only unstable but
explosive.
The relation between these pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology and history is
unclear because his analysis is schematic, abstract, and seemingly unrelated to
any actual historical situation. Yet there is no doubt that Hegel has focused his
attention on social and human relations that lie at the root of most historical
phenomena. Wars and life-and-death struggles are pervasive and never seem to
go away, and Hegel casts them in a new light by seeing their futility in relation
to their underlying theme, that of recognition. Relations of domination and ser-
vitude or enslavement are likewise ubiquitous in human history, and also show
no signs of going away. Hegel reveals their roots in violence and the fear of
death, but also displays their instability as foundations for social order. As we
have seen, Hegel was a child of the Enlightenment who lived in an age of rebel-
lion and revolution, with the recent French example uppermost in his mind.
But his description of exploitation and revolution later served as Marx’s model
as well.
But Hegel’s presentation in the Phenomenology delivers more than just con-
trasting descriptions of two pervasive social phenomena: It also conveys the
sense of a certain “logical” relation between them. The institution of mastery
and servitude is not just different from the struggle to the death, it also represents
an advance over that struggle by offering a solution to its inherent problem. The
life-and-death struggle can (and perhaps does) go on indefinitely, but its ex-
hausted antagonists long for a reprieve from its futility, and something more
than just victory. Servitude provides for (apparent) stability, recognition for the
master, and protection from violent death for the servant.
If the relation of mastery and servitude in its turn reveals itself as unstable, its
instability can have more than one outcome. Rebellion and revolution usually
involve violence and can degenerate into a renewed struggle to the death. (Later
in the Phenomenology [p. 413] Hegel invokes the connection between revolu-
tion and terror.) Alternatively, servants can take revenge by enslaving their mas-
ters and restoring the same relation, with merely a change in personnel. In these
cases, which are exemplified again and again in history, change occurs, but noth-
ing new emerges. With these changes, history offers only cycles of violence,
domination, and counter-domination.
Only one alternative offers a change that is genuinely new and different. Mas-
tery and servitude constitute an unstable relation because it does not provide
what is actually sought and needed by the parties to the relation. Each seeks rec-
ognition, but does not realize that recognition must be reciprocal to be real.
Only mutual recognition, in which each party acknowledges the right of the
other to exist, can truly solve the problems that have beset the social order. Each
sought this recognition from the other all along, but failed to realize that it had
to come from one who was himself granted the legitimate status of an indepen-
dent existence. Only a relationship of mutual recognition can be stable, though
its stability is not guaranteed. Indeed, it may even contain the seeds of its own
self-destruction. The individuals Hegel has in mind, who have demanded their
independence all along, may be impatient with the capacity of the new relation
to assure it. They also have the capacity to tear it apart.
The community of reciprocal recognition can exist only if it consists of genu-
inely independent individuals, yet only this community can confer genuine in-
dependence. This is the dialectical and even paradoxical character of the relation
Hegel is trying here to describe. The independence of self-consciousness is
possible only if it is legitimized and acknowledged by others who are equally in-
dependent. If and when this community of mutual recognition emerges, it con-
stitutes a genuine novelty and a real improvement over the previous stage. Hegel
thus presents his readers with a three-step progression, from the struggle to the
death to the relation of mastery and servitude to the foundation of genuine com-
munity in mutual recognition. He devotes most attention in the Phenomenology
to the second of these, but his description clearly points ahead to the third.
This is where Geist emerges as the “absolute substance which, in the complete
freedom and independence of its opposed members—i.e., different self-
consciousnesses existing for themselves—is the unity of the same” (p. 140).
Thus the community is constituted by individuals who are aware of and assertive
of their individuality and independence (I), but who voluntarily and freely join
with others (We) as fellow members of the same community: “an I that is We,”
as Hegel puts it. It is also “a We that is I” in the sense that Geist as community
now occupies the subject position as agent in its own right. Hegel indicates this
by speaking of spirit as “the action of all” and “the universal work produced by
the actions of all and each, as their unity and identity.” Likewise “action by one
side only would be useless because what is to happen is to be brought about by
both.” Spirit is “the unmoved solid ground and starting-point for the action of
all”—that is, the mutual recognition that constitutes the community makes
common action possible (p. 142). The idea of the common project, including
the project of the community’s self-maintenance and continued solidarity, is
clearly integral to Hegel’s conception of Geist.
But what the account in the Phenomenology reveals is that spirit is not con-
ceived by Hegel as a sort of macro-person that acts and pursues ends of its own
which are unknown to and even contrary to the ends of its constituent members.
In spite of his talk of the “cunning of reason” in the lectures, he does not wish to
detach entirely the activities of spirit from those of the individuals that make it
up. To be sure, there is a difference between ends pursued by individuals in their
own interest, and ends pursued collectively by members of a group, and these
can often conflict. Indeed, individuals can belong to different groups simultane-
ously and can be torn by conflicting loyalties: family versus state, religion
versus profession, and so on. But these conflicts are not hidden from the indi-
viduals subject to them, and they must often be resolved and reconciled by con-
scious action. As we have seen, spirit as it is presented in the Phenomenology
consists of independent self-consciousnesses, and these may have to suppress

their independence for the sake of the whole. Such suppression will not be with-
out pain, which is part of the price paid for recognition by others.
This account of Geist not only brings it closer to the individuals that make it
up, it also places its emergence to some extent under their control. That is, it
appears that the establishment of community through mutual recognition is
something that individuals can choose, acting to overcome the relations of
domination and servitude that determine their existence with others. Those in
servitude, who according to Hegel bear within themselves the “truth” of the re-
lationship with the master (p. 147), are propelled to seek freedom in overthrow-
ing the master, but have the choice among violence, reverse domination, or
mutual recognition. In a sense Hegel’s account lays out the choices available to
those who are newly free and urges upon them the choice of recognition, recon-
ciliation, and community. Hegel is not asserting that this choice has been made,
or even predicting it; he is advocating it.
10. Hegel as Reformer

If we look at Hegel’s narrative in this way, reading his account in the Phenomenol-
ogy into the philosophy of history, we can see it not as describing the history of
mankind, but urging that it move in a certain direction. He is organizing the past
in order to make a case for a particular future, that of the realization of human
freedom. In the 1820s, when the reaction of European countries to the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests was still being formed, it was signifi-
cant to argue in favor of mutual recognition and human freedom, rather than
simply order and restoration, as the direction of history. Hegel is addressing his
European contemporaries and saying: We constitute a community in virtue of
what we have been through together. Because of our common experience, his-
tory can now be seen to have a significance that could not be seen by those who
lived through it. He is urging that the contentious history of modern Europe be
transformed dialectically from bloody conflict and the see-saw of domination to
the emergence of a new community.
The idea of Hegel as an advocate for a certain historical direction accords well
with the picture that emerges from Terry Pinkard’s magisterial biography. Ac-
cording to Pinkard (2000), from his student days on, Hegel envisaged a career as
a “popular philosopher” in the mold of the French philosophes and their counter-
parts in Scotland. Rather than an academic career, he sought to influence public
opinion by writing for the sophisticated journals that were becoming more
numerous in the German-speaking lands. Along with his youthful friends Hölder-
lin and Schelling, he wanted to combine “Kant’s idea of a ‘religion of morality’
with his own critique of the fragmentation of modern life,” to produce a revolu-
tion in Germany that would follow from the application of Kant’s philosophy (p.
61). Later (around 1800), when the prospect of an academic position opened up
at Jena, and his work as a popular writer had had little effect, Hegel decided, “no
doubt at first with some reluctance, that such ‘intervention’ in the life of men
could come only by his producing some writing ‘in the form of a system.’ He had
decided that in order for him to become an ‘educator of the people,’ it was first
necessary to become a philosopher following Fichte’s model and to join the
newly conceived Fichtean university within modern life” (p. 87). According to
Pinkard these motivations remained unchanged throughout Hegel’s life.
Pinkard’s account makes possible and necessary a substantial revision of the
standard view of Hegel as a philosopher and of the underlying motivation of his
work. Hegel is thought of as both the academic philosopher and the systematic
philosopher par excellence. From the first decade of the 19th century on, Hegel
labored to perfect his “system,” and the Phenomenology was originally conceived
as the introduction to it. From the time he moved to Berlin in 1818 Hegel as-
sumed the status of an academic superstar; he was at the center of German uni-
versity reform with the newly founded University of Berlin as its flagship. Yet
Pinkard’s biography suggests that Hegel followed this career path by default be-
cause he couldn’t achieve his original ambition to be a popular reformer. And it
suggests further that the philosophical system was itself conceived merely as a
means to achieve reform. Even the Logic, the most daunting and seemingly ab-
stract part of the system, was intended, according to Pinkard, “to provide the
overall structure and legitimation of post-Napoleonic European life.” “Self-
grounding ‘logic’ would teach us how to think as free, enlightened moderns”
(p. 342). This is the framework in which we must understand and interpret the
late lectures on the philosophy of history.
It is true that Hegel’s narrative is not limited to Europe but is projected onto
the grand scale of humanity as a whole. And we know retrospectively that part of
Hegel’s problem is that he identified the two. It has often been pointed out that
Hegel’s philosophy of history expresses the ideology of the colonialist age that
was already under way and reached its apogee in the 19th century. Humanity is
close to reaching its destination in the constitutional states of Europe, and if the
rest of the world is not there yet, then the European powers have the task, indeed
the duty, to assist them on the way. The idea of the “white man’s burden,” identi-
fied with British colonialism, was no doubt expressed in equivalent formulations
by apologists for French, Dutch, and German colonial ventures. To be sure, this
can be seen as disingenuous rationalization for economic exploitation, racism,
and raw lust for power; but motives are usually mixed, and no doubt many
people actually believed that they were fulfilling some benevolent, world histori-
cal obligation.
But the major problem of Hegel’s philosophy of history as not merely that it
is Eurocentric; he certainly cannot be blamed for the depredations of colonial-
ism. Looked at from his own point of view, as we have interpreted it, his philoso-
phy of history suffers from a different problem. When it is understood not as a
putative science but as a kind of world historical rhetoric, its problem is not that
it makes false predictions or implausible claims about the end of history, but that
it is not able to constitute a community of humanity by telling a persuasive story
about it. If it is in fact a failure, its failure is not theoretical but practical. In this
sense its failure may be even more predictable or inevitable than in its theoretical
interpretation, and perhaps even more tragic and more naïve. Spirit’s realization
in freedom did not occur in Hegel’s time, as a result of his persuasive attempts;
nor is it anywhere near realization today.
But Hegel’s philosophy of history need not be viewed simply as a failure. Seen
as a practical narrative, rather than as a speculative science, it exemplifies certain
features of the way we view history in light of narrative and time. To draw this
chapter to a close, we need to move from our reading of Hegel to some larger
conclusions about the classical philosophy of history.
11. Hegel and Beyond

Hegel has been the focus of our attention throughout much of Chapters IV and
V of this study, for reasons we explained at the outset. While some philosophers
have tried to describe something called the “speculative philosophy of history”
in the abstract, as if it were some timeless set of questions, Hegel has always
served as the paradigm for this endeavor, both for those who take up his ques-
tions and try to give new answers to them, like Marx, and for those—much
more numerous—critics of the project who labor to denounce it from different
points of view. Hegel has also served this paradigmatic role, mostly unwittingly,
for historians of philosophy who imagine that the “speculative philosophy of
history” began its career in Jewish religious thought, or perhaps with Augustine,
and continued as a recognizable discipline until its demise sometime in the
20th century. As we saw, what such accounts do is project Hegel’s concerns
anachronistically back onto philosophical views—and even pre-philosophical
worldviews—that arise out of very different interests and concerns.
Our claim, then, has been that what we prefer to call the “classical” philoso-
phy of history has been shaped by Hegel’s thought and above all by certain inter-
pretations and reactions to it in the century and a half since Hegel delivered his
lectures. Philosophy never consists of abstract sets of questions isolated from
their historical contexts, and this is true a fortiori of the philosophy of history. Its
“classical” version is a phenomenon of the modern European world, of the
powerfully articulated views of Hegel in particular, and of the responses by other

philosophers, both positive and negative, to these views.
Our own purpose, however, has not been limited to emphasizing Hegel’s
role in setting the agenda for the classical philosophy of history. Instead we
wanted to urge a different reading of Hegel’s project that has largely escaped his
critics, one which makes more sense, and a different sense, of what he was
doing. We have argued that Hegel’s ultimate purpose in advancing a philosophy
of history was not to make theoretical or metaphysical claims about the origin
and destiny of world history, but to mount a rhetorical and persuasive account
that would help move it toward a certain goal. There is no doubt that in his lec-
tures Hegel is telling the story of world history, and his story bears all the marks
of a narrative: It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has a central subject
(Geist and ultimately Weltgeist) whose story is being told; and it portrays this
subject as an agent acting with a certain end (freedom) in view. But our conten-
tion has been that if Hegel’s account is a narrative it should be read as a practical,
not a theoretical, narrative. His purpose in telling this story is not to claim that
the end has been reached by the protagonist in question, but to urge its attain-
ment and even to help constitute and maintain the central subject which acts
toward this goal. If we read Hegel’s text in this way we can see that it resembles
in its practical function the political rhetoric that has traditionally been em-
ployed by orators who want to move their audiences to act in certain ways. As
we’ve seen, this changes the register in which Hegel’s discourse is to be under-
stood. But this change is not simply a change from description to prescription;
instead it must be understood as a redescription in which the past is redeployed
in such a way as to fit a larger narrative spanning past, present, and future.
This rereading of Hegel’s philosophy of history serves a larger purpose. We
want to say something about the project of the classical approach which applies
not just to Hegel but to others as well. We have already found clues to this re-
reading in the relation of Kant’s thoughts on history to his own practical philoso-
phy, and we have interpreted Hegel’s successor Marx along similar lines, as many
others have done. But in the end we want to develop a sense of the philosophy of
history which is not limited to any of its classical proponents but emerges as an
expression of our fundamental human relation to time and social existence. This
does not mean that we want to establish some abstract set of questions or con-
cepts which would constitute the “practical” philosophy of history as a branch or
sub-discipline of philosophy in general. The project we envisage can never be
detached from its historical antecedents or understood apart from them. But it
can be seen as interpreting their strategies and concepts in light of a more funda-
mental sense of historicity.
According to our account the classical philosophy of history situates itself in
the present, where the present is seen not as the endpoint of a historical process,
but as the turning point between past and future. Like practical narrative in gen-
eral, which we discussed in Section 3, it tells a story in order to rearrange the “fit”
between past and future, and to project a certain future as arising meaningfully
out of a past series of events. In this sense it is consistent with the kind of practi-
cal discourse found in everyday life and in the social and political realm. It also
differs from this practical discourse, however, in several respects.
First, it supposes that we look at ourselves as parts of larger-scale communi-
ties, and project ourselves onto the world stage. It supposes that we can think
and act meaningfully, or at least contemplate action, at this rather elevated level.
In this context it is perhaps helpful to recall our discussion in Chapter II of the
experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Our
claim there was that events are not all situated on the same temporal plane, but
that they occupy different strata or levels, the highest of which can be considered
that of world historical events. If this level can occasionally come to the surface
as part of the horizon of our experience, it can also figure as part of the horizon
of action. At the limit these large-scale projections can expand to encompass
humanity as a whole. Though the idea of the “human community” has repeat-
edly proved to be wildly impractical as a motivating force for collective action, it
still offers a possible background for human endeavor.
Second, we see the problems of the present as the culmination of a process
that points us in a certain direction. It belongs to human historicity, and not just
to human temporality, that we see ourselves and our present situation as the
dramatic turning point between past and future, and we arrange the past in such
a way as to make a certain future meaningful if not inevitable. In this sense nar-
rative is not only the metaphysics of everyday life, as Danto said, but also the
metaphysics of social and historical life as well. It gives “meaning” to large-scale
historical events, in that special sense of “meaning” reserved for the practical
sphere. It places those events that have already happened into a framework that
points the way toward doing something about them. It opens the horizon of the
future to action, not just contemplation or even prediction. In Hegel’s case, if
we find a way to see the historical past as the steady progression of human free-
dom, it makes it possible for us to see how that progress might continue to its
realization.
This brings us back to the point at which we began, with the curious apparent
revival of a Hegel-style classical theory at the end of the 20th century in Francis
Fukuyama’s The End of History. As we saw, this work was rather condescendingly
relegated to the rank of pop philosophy by the experts, and in a certain sense
they were not wrong in this assessment. But they miss the point if they use this
as an excuse for not taking the work seriously. It was precisely meant for a wide
popular audience and for a readership which could have an influence on policy.
Its author was not at that time an academic but was supported by the RAND
Corporation (Fukuyama 1992, p. ix). It later became clear that the work was in-
fluential on the neo-conservative ideologues who came to power with the
second Bush administration, and it helped shape their thinking in important
ways. In a sense Fukuyama was for a time exactly the sort of “popular philoso-
pher” that Hegel so aspired to become.
What Fukuyama does is to borrow liberally from the 19th-century master of
world historical rhetoric to produce his own attempt at persuasive rhetoric for
the turn of the 21st century. In some ways his rhetorical purpose is more evident
than Hegel’s. The latter has obviously convinced many of his readers, especially
the critical ones, that he was making straightforward claims about the end of his-
tory. Fukuyama, by contrast, puts it this way: He wants to raise the question
“whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to
speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead
the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy” (p. xii). For Fukuyama the
status of his discourse is to raise a question, not to make an assertion, and the
putative end of history is clearly located in the “eventual” future, not in the pres-
ent. Fukuyama assumes this more modest stance partly because he knows per-
fectly well (see his Chapter 1) that the idea of the end of history has fallen into
disrepute since Hegel’s time.
Apart from his apparent caution, Fukuyama’s strategy is very similar to
Hegel’s. With an impressive-looking graph on the development of “liberal de-
mocracies worldwide” (pp. 49–50) he draws up a long list of countries from
Asia, East Europe, and Latin America that by 1990 can be so described. Borrow-
ing Hegel’s notion of the “struggle for recognition,” he tries to show that the
move toward freedom will naturally complement the advance of technology
throughout the world. In this way he makes his argument for the “coherent and
directional History” that will “eventually” benefit the “greater part of humanity.”
Like any practical narrative, Fukuyama’s work uses a redescription of the past to
urge the realization of a certain future, where the arrival of “liberal democracy”
occupies the place that “freedom” held in Hegel’s version.
Unfortunately for large parts of humanity, Fukuyama’s practical narrative was
in an indirect way more efficacious than Hegel’s. In the view of neo-conservative
policymakers, if the rest of the world was on the verge of adopting American-
style liberal democracy anyway, there was nothing wrong with employing Amer-
ican military power to nudge it in that direction (see Pfaff 2010). It was one of
the illusions of the second Iraq war that American troops would be welcomed
with flowers and that it was only a matter of time before the rest of the Middle
East did the same, transforming itself into a region of peace-loving democracies.
Of course, as with earlier colonialist rhetoric, many view this messianic justifica-
tion as a cover for raw power and oil politics. Whether it is seen as criminal na-
iveté, imperialist rationalization, or cynical propaganda in the end doesn’t matter
much, since the policy self-destructed under the weight of its own wild imprac-
ticality and the breath-taking incompetence of those who tried to carry it out.
Thus Fukuyama’s attempt to revive the classical philosophy of history came to
a bad end, though perhaps he, like Hegel, should not be held responsible. Does
this mean that any such project, following in the footsteps of the classical phi-
losophy of history, will end in failure? It could be argued that such large-scale
projections onto the future, which we have called practical narratives, are in fact
eo ipso impractical, perhaps because they seem to require imposing a vision on a
world that has no interest in such a vision. But the kind of projection we have
described here is not necessarily linked to imperialist expansion or imposition
by force of arms. If 19th-century colonialism and 21st-century American impe-
rialism ultimately come to grief, it is because they try to enforce their vision by
force, not because they tell a large-scale story about world history.
Our point here has been that the classical philosophy of history derives from
impulses that lie embedded in our historicity—that is, in our relation to time
and narrative. Because of this, the thinking and conceptual configurations that
we have encountered in Hegel and other thinkers will be permanent features of
our engagement with history that arise out of our experience of history. It is a
general feature of our temporality as subjects of experience and action that we
are situated in the present and face a future that we can affect with our planning
and action. Our figuring of the future involves a refiguring of the past and the
construction of a practical narrative to make sense of what we do. Our claim here
is that this practical-narrative structure not only exists at the individual level, but
is found also on the social and communal plane and on the larger-scale and lon-
ger-term plane of history.
12. Conclusion
What is the relation between experience and practice, with reference to history?
What unites the reflections of Chapters I to III with those of Chapters IV and V?
A recent New Yorker cartoon portrays a man visiting an office which offers
“career counseling” and “occupational testing.” He is telling the counselor behind
the desk: “There’s a lot I want to experience, but not a lot I actually want to do.”
His words express implicitly one version of the relation between experience and
practice: They are opposed. In experience we take in and acquire; in practice we
give back, we act upon the world. This accords with some of our reflections in
our first three chapters. There we tried to get closer to the concept of experience
by contrasting it to the sophistication of rationality and conceptuality. As we
saw, philosophers have repeatedly called us back to experience as a return to in-
nocence. It can be seen as part of the motivation behind the foundation of
British empiricism, and Dewey explicitly used these terms. Even Husserl’s motto
for phenomenology, “to the things themselves!” can be interpreted in this way.
The underlying theme here seems to be the distinction between passivity and
activity, and experience, at least in our first sense of that term, is clearly passive.
And yet the matter was not so simple, as we saw. Kant distinguishes receptiv-
ity and spontaneity, between what is given and what is thought, and spontaneity
takes the form of judgment, guided by the categories of the understanding. He
calls judgment an Aktus and a Handlung—that is, an act (p. B130). But he ap-
plied the term “Erfahrung,” at least in his dominant sense of that term, to the
combination of passivity and activity. Experience, in this sense, puts us in touch
not just with our sensations but with the world of objects, but we must realize
that this is a world largely of our own conceptual construction. The Humean–
Hegelian concept of experience (our second sense above) as long-term accumula-
tion of patterns and repetitions, in which we build up acquaintances and
expectations, is anything but innocence. In fact, as we saw in the terms of Wil-
liam Blake adopted by Martin Jay, experience in this sense is to be contrasted with
innocence. It is not, like sensation, a punctual and direct contact with reality, but
is mediated by time and repetition, and by the mind’s capacity to recognize the
emerging patterns.
Along with innocence, passivity itself seems to play a diminished role in the
modern conception of experience. Locke’s notion of the pristine “white paper”
proves inadequate to account for what we know, and philosophers turn more
and more attention to the capacities of the mind to receive what is given. If we
think of the Humean concept of experience (sense two) in its extended Hegelian
form, it looks more like a process of experimentation, shot through with negativ-
ity and error, but dependent on the activity of the mind in formulating hypoth-
eses. In the 20th century, Popper makes a similar point against the positivist
conception of science: It deals with the given only in the context of hypotheses
formulated by an active mind. Though Rorty maintains that the concept of the
mind as a passive “mirror of nature” retains its hold on modern philosophy, it is
increasingly eclipsed by philosophers’ attention to the activity of mind in shap-
ing, even constructing, the world of its experience.
Yet an element of passivity clings to the concept of experience, in spite of all
this. We see this more clearly when we recall that the connection we are consid-
ering is that between experience and practice, not between experience and activ-
ity. Even Kant did not consider his account of the “spontaneity” of mind part of
his practical philosophy. The latter term is reserved for the deliberative and the
chosen. Kant’s mental, conceptual activity operates unconsciously, as many
commentators have pointed out, and in Hume’s account of experience, the con-
nections between cause and effect emerge habitually, not reflectively. Even
Hegel’s account of experience in the Phenomenology suggests that the important
changes take place on their own, not as a result of conscious choice. If the Phe-
nomenology, as the science of the experience of consciousness, tells us the story of
conflicting concepts, rather than conflicting sensations, it is a story in which the
subject of that experience is caught up, often without understanding what is
happening.
The same element of passivity attaches to the temporality of experience, which
we examined in order to fill out the modern account of experience, drawing on
Husserl and the phenomenological movement he inspired. Though conscious-
ness “constitutes” the temporal field, in Husserl’s terminology, thanks to its
retentional–protentional structure, constitution is not deliberative, reflective, or
practical in any sense. Though Husserl’s account of consciousness is immensely
more complicated and subtle than Locke’s passive “white paper,” the temporal
structuring of experience in his account still belongs to the level of what he calls
“passive synthesis.”
Thus no matter how much the mind, with its a priori concepts, structures, and
capacities, may contribute to the “constitution” of the world, experience still
presents us with that world without our actively having any say in it. To that
extent the term “given” is still appropriate, especially if we take this term as a
phenomenological description of the subjective or lived character of the experi-
ence, and divest it of any foundational role. This notion of being “presented”
with the world also reminds us that experience remains, as we have stressed,
anchored in the present—a continuous present, to be sure, with its horizons of
retention and protention forming the background from which it stands out, but
a present nevertheless. It is the present which occupies us in experience, and we
turn away from it when we recollect the past and envision the future, in what
Husserl called the secondary forms of memory and expectation.
The temporal passivity of experience also involves its openness to the future.
Because we always have protentions, which are like habits of primary expecta-
tion, we can also be surprised, even shocked, disoriented, and sometimes devas-
tated, by what we experience. Because we always know—though not in a
conceptual way—even amid the most humdrum routine, that experience can
always surprise us, experience is always a bit of an adventure, an openness to an
otherness always lurking around the next corner. In many respects, human exis-
tence can be described as a constant attempt to reduce to a minimum the capac-
ity of the future to surprise us. But we can never fully succeed.
As we have seen, of course, temporality is not the only component of our
experience of history. All experience is temporal—including our experience of
nature and our experience of our own bodies in their most intimate and natural
dimensions. Our experience of history originates in our relation to the social
present, our inherence in the space of interaction and exchange with others.
Here we encounter the world of communities and their habitations, and our
experience of them consists, as we saw, not primarily in observation or percep-

tion but in participation and membership. It is here that the first-person plural,
the “we,” emerges as the true subject of social experience. It is the social tempo-
rality of our inherence in communities that constitutes the first instance of our
historicity, and historical events are constituted as such in virtue of our participa-
tion in them. In the striking examples of the events of Nov. 9, 1989, Sept. 11,
2001, and Nov. 4, 2008, we get a glimpse of what it means to experience history
in the full sense of encounter, participation, and social temporality.
If this is our experience of history, where does practice come in? As we just
noted, and as we explained in Chapter III, we distinguish between the lived and
retained past of our continuous experience and the recollected and represented
past to which we turn in the usual sense of memory. This is the past which oc-
cupies us in historical inquiry, and we gain access to it by disengaging ourselves
from the living present.
Following Husserl, we can make the same distinction regarding the future.
We always live within the horizon of protention, and the continuity of our expe-
rience extends into the anticipated future. At the risk of straining the spatial
metaphor, we can regard the horizon of protention in the same way we speak of
the horizon of retention, namely as a kind of background from which the present
stands out, and without which it would not be what it is. To be present, after all,
that is, to occur or to happen, is not merely to take the place of something else, it
is also to stand ready to be replaced by what is to come. Whatever the source of
the content of our protentions in past experience (this is where our sense two, the
Humean–Hegelian notion of experience, comes in), however open and indeter-
minate it may be, we are never without protentions in some degree of determi-
nateness. To live in the present is to walk on the ever-changing threshold of the
future. And according to Husserl, this protention of the future, no less that our
retention of the past, belongs to the realm of passive synthesis.
The situation is altogether different when we disengage from our living, re-
tentional–protentional experience, in order to envisage or consider the future
for its own sake. When we do this, as we so often do, there are many different
attitudes we may take up. We can wonder about the future, we can wish or hope
it will turn out a certain way, we can fear and dread the future as well. Or, we can
plan our action in order to affect it, to make it turn out as we want it to be. We can
regard the future, in other words, as something not merely to be expected, but as
something to be made. This is the realm of practice, where we not merely experi-
ence the world but act upon it.
This, I would argue, is the attitude toward the future that was taken up by the
classical philosophers of history. The object of their concern was not the future
in general, of course, but the large-scale social future of the communities to
which they belonged. The practical attitude can be taken up toward the
small-scale future as well as the large-scale, and it can concern the natural as well
as the social world. It is the practical attitude that can convert the natural world
into materials and tools for fashioning, shaping, and building, and the projects
that result can affect our immediate surroundings in the short-term future. This
is what the Greeks called techne and what has always given us the character of
homo faber. We do more than experience our world; we act in it and on it.
What distinguishes the classical philosophers of history is that they took up
this attitude toward the large-scale, long-term social world. What they did was
not possible, according to Kosellek, before the end of the 18th century. They
give expression to and embody the Enlightenment conception of a future which
is no longer an object merely of prophecy, expectation, and hope or fear, but a
future human beings can control. This is why, as we have maintained, the phi-
losophy of history begins with Kant and his contemporaries and successors, and
why earlier thinkers articulate not so much a philosophy as a theology of history.
Löwith, of course, applied this term to Hegel and Marx as well. And he would be
right if these thinkers are to be understood simply as making metaphysical claims
about the “meaning,” “direction,” and “end” of history.
Our thesis in this chapter is that they can and should be read in another way.
Though they often seem to use the language of prediction and even prophecy,
they are really expressing a practical attitude toward the future and participating,
through their language and their concepts, in an effort to move history is a cer-
tain direction. Theirs is an attitude toward history that all of us—in the modern
world—share to some extent, whether we are philosophers or not. For us, his-
tory is something we experience. But it is a practical matter as well.
VI
Phenomenologists on History
Our investigations so far have been conducted under the rubric of the phenom-
enology of history, with phenomenology being considered as a method or ap-
proach to experience. While I have occasionally discussed Husserl, Heidegger,
and others in the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology, my purpose has not
been exegetical. Rather, I have sought inspiration in their approach to the phe-
nomenological question of how history is experienced and enters our lives.
In this chapter I want to focus more directly on the phenomenological tradi-
tion itself, and on Husserl in particular. While I have drawn on certain themes
that are basic to his thought, such as intentionality, temporality, intersubjectivity,
etc., I have had very little to say about his own views on history. In fact these
views changed considerably from his earliest to his latest works, and considering
these views and their development will cast some light, and thus open up a new
perspective, on the relation between phenomenology and history. How did the
founder of 20th-century phenomenology himself think about applying his
method to the phenomenon of history?
The story of Husserl’s views on history cannot be understood apart from his
early reaction to the pervasive historicism of the 19th-century German philo-
sophical tradition in which he began his work. We will begin by describing the
German historicism that Husserl confronted. For this we will need to return
briefly to Hegel, not for his own sake but to trace the emergence of historicism
from his thought. Then we will look at Husserl’s early reaction, and to his
thoughts on history prior to his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences. There,
in the 1930s, his views on history take a new turn, and we shall devote some at-
tention to that work and the ideas about history that are developed there. The
important positive and negative influence of Heidegger, whose ideas on history
began to appear in the same period, will emerge along the way. Finally we shall
turn briefly to the views of post-Husserlian French phenomenologists on his-
tory. Thus this chapter, while its focus will be Husserl, will also touch on the
phenomenological tradition he founded, as well as the broader canvas of modern
German philosophy from which it comes.
141
1. The Emergence of 19th-Century German Historicism

Since Herder and Kant, German philosophers had devoted special attention to
history and accorded it an important place in their thought. The central role of
history in German philosophy reached its peak in Hegel, and although there was
a widespread backlash against the dominance of Hegelian thought after his
death, as we saw in Chapter IV, many aspects of his thought survived in the
German philosophy of the 19th century. History was one of these. Thinkers as
diverse as Karl Marx, the historians of the Historical School, and Wilhelm Dil-
they denounced the Hegelian philosophy of history and were firmly convinced
that they had liberated themselves from it. And indeed each of these rejected
important features of Hegel’s philosophy of history. But they retained, some-
times even without realizing it, the underlying historicization of reason and ex-
perience that lay at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy.
I will begin by describing in broad strokes the process that led from Hegel’s
philosophy of history to the deeper-lying and pervasive residue of historical
thinking that survived in 19th-century German intellectual life. Though it was
not a unified phenomenon, the widespread current known as Historismus or His-
torizismus was one of the dominant features of German thinking at the end of the
19th century. Then I will turn to Husserl’s reaction to this current in the early
20th century, a reaction that turned out to be one of the defining features of the
emergence of phenomenology. But Husserl’s own thinking on this matter
evolved, and the historical preoccupations of his latest work, though they devel-
oped gradually, were in sharp contrast to his early reactions to historicism. Thus
in the end, as we shall see, Husserl moves from an initial alienation from the
historicist thought of his German predecessors to something like a reconcilia-
tion with it.
As we have seen, the idea of history as the story of human salvation was em-
bedded in Christian theology from its earliest beginnings. What was new in the
Enlightenment was the idea that human beings, through the exercise of their
reason, could work out their own salvation. No longer dependent on divine
providence and the actions of a god whose ways they could not always under-
stand, human beings now thought they could take their destiny into their own
hands. Predicting man’s mastery and possession of nature, in the 17th century,
Descartes already foresaw the growth of technology in the 18th and 19th. To
this the French Enlightenment added the idea of self-mastery and self-posses-
sion. The social and political arrangements of human society were now included
in the purview of human control. The future was not merely something to be
predicted; it was something to be made.
The broadest outlines of the Enlightenment conception of history thus
emerge: Emancipating itself from a past of ignorance, superstition, and misery,
P henomenol og ists on Hi stor y 143
humanity faced a future of steady progress toward a self-created human happi-

ness. One might think that a future dependent on our own actions would be
more precarious and uncertain than one guaranteed by divine command, but
such was the exuberance and self-confidence of the Enlightenment that all
doubts seemed to be banished from the historical scene.
Kant and Herder were the heirs of this Enlightenment thought at the end of
the 18th century, and each reacted critically. As German Protestants, they were
disinclined to accept the strongly anti-religious ideas of the French philosophes
who dominated the 18th-century discussion. They thought that the first blows
for religious emancipation had already been struck by the Reformation, which
they saw as a renewal, not a denial, of religion. Kant wanted to limit the preten-
tions of scientific reason, as well as those of traditional theology. The idea of a
“universal history,” conceived by the Enlightenment as human progress, he con-
sidered at best a possibility, not a certainty. As for Herder, he was skeptical of the
Enlightenment idea that human reason is a universal force with a single direction.
He was more impressed with the diversity of human cultures and languages, and
believed that any “philosophy of the history of humanity” had to take this di-
versity into account.
The ideas of Herder and Kant, along with those of other thinkers of this late
Enlightenment period of German philosophy, set the stage for Hegel’s histori-
cization of philosophy. But the influence of Kant’s and Herder’s thought on
Hegel’s went much deeper than their explicit ideas on history. From Kant
Hegel inherited the idea that our relation to the world is mediated by categories
of thought, which for Hegel meant an interplay of appearance and reality. In-
stead of universal structures of thought, Hegel saw these categories as “shapes
of spirit” embedded, à la Herder, in diverse cultures and languages. Hegel thus
shifted the focus of modern philosophy from the individual subject to the
social subject (Geist) as the source of knowledge, self-development (Bildung),
and self-realization. Kant’s categorical scheme was transformed into a multi-
plicity of categorical schemes, and these in turn were conceived as succeeding
one another in a historical progression. For Hegel reason itself is historical,
displaying itself in historical forms and unfolding in a pattern of self-alienation
and self-reconciliation.
This idea first emerged in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes of 1807 (see
Chapter V), in which historical phenomena (Greek tragedy, medieval mysti-
cism, the French Revolution, and the Terror) served as illustrations of shapes of
spirit conflicting with and succeeding one another in dialectical progression. By
the time his thought matured in the 1820s, Hegel developed a conception of his-
tory that had a coherent internal structure and had a decisive place in his system
as a whole. The dialectical structure of ideas, presented in the Logic, externalizes
itself in Nature, but both structures are essentially timeless and unchanging.
eginning in and emerging from nature, human history represents the dialecti-
B
cal progression of the alienated idea back to the possession of itself. Hegel por-
trays the panorama of world history as the struggle for freedom, moving from
the ancient despotism of the East, in which only one is free, to the world of the
Greeks and Romans, in which only some are free. Christianity gives birth to the
idea that all are free, but this freedom still has to be realized in human society.
The struggle for the realization of this freedom is the story of human history,
represented by the passage from the medieval world through the Reformation to
modernity and Enlightenment. In a trajectory that moves from east to west, cul-
minating in the modern states of Europe, Hegel sees the world spirit on the verge
of realizing its internally driven destiny: freedom for all. Only against the back-
ground of the social and political freedom at the end of history could philosophy
itself rise above its own limitations and come fully into possession of itself, un-
derstanding and ultimately justifying in retrospect the historical identity of
thought and being.
Hegel’s ideas on history are most clearly expressed in the introduction to his
lectures on the philosophy of history, to which we devoted considerable atten-
tion in Chapters IV and V. Hegel gave these lectures several times at the Univer-
sity of Berlin in the 1820s. Published and widely read, and soon translated into
other languages (e.g., English in 1857), they became synonymous with “philos-
ophy of history” for a whole generation of readers. But this sense of “philosophy
of history” was made possible by another development in German intellectual
life—that is, the emergence of history itself as an academic discipline.
Prior to the late 18th century, the task of telling the story of the past and that
of seeking its ultimate meaning, especially in theological terms, were so closely
intertwined that the distinction would be an artificial imposition. It is only after
history begins to establish itself as an autonomous enterprise, and to acquire the
status of an academic discipline, that the two tasks can be separated. A university
chair of history was first established in Berlin in 1810 (see Hayden White 1973,
p. 136), and it is a few years after this that Hegel starts giving his lectures on the
philosophy of history. Leopold von Ranke, outstanding historian of the period,
famously renounces the task that had traditionally been associated with history,
that of finding edification and moral lessons in past events, and encourages the
development of a discipline which is nonpartisan, objective, and based strictly
on documentary evidence. Hegel, in the opening pages of his lectures, endorses
the division of labor between history proper and the philosophy of history, and
later feels he has to defend himself against the charge that he is encroaching on
“a science that regards itself as empirical” (Hegel 1988, p. 68).
Thus the establishment of the philosophy of history as a separate inquiry and
the establishment of history as a serious academic discipline go hand in hand.
Many of the historians of the “Historical School” rejected Hegel’s approach as
empty speculation, insisting that claims about the past had to be warranted by
documentary and other evidence. But their new historical researches, stamped
now with the status of a new sort of “science,” cast new light on the medieval and
ancient antecedents of 19th-century Europe. They adhered to the conviction
that human institutions and human society could be understood only as emerg-
ing from the past. The widespread intellectual phenomenon known as “histori-
cism” gathered steam in the course of the 19th century, and it was nothing less
than a revision of traditional ideas of human nature. It insisted on the thoroughly
historical character of everything human. Prior to the 19th century religion and
reason had vied with each other as providing the key to humanity. Now history
took the place of both: To understand the human being, we have to understand
his history.
But this idea was already present in Hegel, and the only thing that the histori-
cists questioned was Hegel’s claim that man’s historical diversity is leading to a
grand historical synthesis. This later idea was of course crucial to Hegel’s system
as a whole, but the underlying conception of human nature, on which it was
based, was thus passed along to his successors.
2. Historicism and Marxism

While historicism was gaining adherents among the bourgeois and the profes-
sors, Karl Marx was preparing his challenge to capitalism. As we saw in Chapter
IV, Marx acknowledged some debt to Hegel’s thought but insisted that he was
transforming it fundamentally. For Marx, Hegel was an idealist who thought
that history marched on its head; Marx claimed to put it back on its feet by ad-
vancing his historical materialism. Witnessing the Industrial Revolution and the
rise of 19th-century capitalism in Western Europe, Marx was convinced that the
reality of history lay in the class struggle engendered by the private ownership
of the means of production. The movement of history was dialectical, but in-
stead of a clash of ideas or “shapes of spirit,” it was a clash of material conditions
and economic interests. This has been true throughout human history, Marx
believed, but in the excesses of capitalism the historical process has reached its
final form. The industrial proletariat has emerged as the true subject of history,
the exploited and oppressed class, destined through socialist revolution to effect
the final emancipation of all mankind from its entire history of oppression and
exploitation.
Here we see a pattern that resembles the historicist reaction to Hegel: Reject-
ing the supposedly “idealist” conception of human nature, Marx and his follow-
ers thought that they had rejected the core of the Hegelian philosophy of history.
But they retained an account of history as a dialectical struggle, and reproduced
even the Hegelian idea of a final synthesis in which all struggles would ultimately
be overcome. Most important, they share with historicism the conviction that
human nature is essentially historical, and that everything about social, cultural,
and political reality can be understood only by understanding its history.
3. Husserl and Dilthey

Hegel, certainly Marx, and possibly the Historical School as well, did not figure
importantly in Husserl’s education and they did not directly influence his mature
philosophical thought, either positively or negatively. His teacher Brentano, and
other Austrian philosophers of the last decades of the 19th century, had favored
the British empiricists over the German Idealists and even over Kant as precur-
sors of the kind of philosophy they wanted to advance. As Husserl moved from
mathematics to philosophy in the 1880s and 1890s, the issues that captured his
attention involved the emergence of psychology as an empirical discipline and
the advocacy of a quasi-Platonic approach to logic in people like Frege and Mei-
nong. If Husserl was aware of the deep preoccupation with history in German
intellectual life in the 19th century, it probably came to his attention primarily in
the work of Wilhelm Dilthey.
We have encountered this philosopher before at several points. A generation
older than Husserl, Dilthey was a well-known professor in Berlin when Husserl
published his breakthrough work, the Logical Investigations, in 1900–01. Dilthey
took note of the younger man’s work and praised it, though on the surface it
seemed far from his concerns. Dilthey was known for his efforts to develop a
humanistic (as opposed to naturalistic) psychology and for proposing a “critique
of historical reason.” This term echoes Kant’s first critique and tells us a lot about
Dilthey’s approach. Though he was not considered a neo-Kantian, his views on
history paralleled Kant’s in two ways. First, he rejected historical speculation,
particularly as practiced by Hegel, just as Kant had criticized metaphysical/
theological speculation. Second, just as Kant wanted to provide an account of
our science of nature, Dilthey wanted to account for historical knowledge. Like
the neo-Kantians of his day, he distinguished between the natural sciences and
the sciences of spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) or human sciences, insisting that the
fundamental concepts and methods of the two groups of sciences differ radi-
cally, and that the human sciences cannot be reduced to the natural. He con-
trasted the explanation of natural phenomena with the understanding of human
actions and experiences, stressing the role of interpretation (hermeneutics) in
the latter. Interpretation is a retrospective procedure, casting human endeavors
in light of their antecedents and prospects, and human existence is above all
social existence.
While Dilthey shares many of these ideas with the neo-Kantians, he draws
even more noticeably on the Historical School and historicism. Rejecting like
them the Hegelian philosophy of history, he shares with them the belief in the
thoroughly historical character of everything human. Historical knowledge is
possible, Dilthey believes, because we are first of all historical beings. At the
level of everyday experience, without being historians or practicing historical
research, we understand ourselves, each other, and our actions and experiences,
in light of the social past from which we emerge.
4. Husserl’s Response to Historicism

In Dilthey, then, Husserl encountered a representative of the deeply historicist
thinking of German philosophy and German intellectual life at the end of the
19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Husserl’s attitude is initially nega-
tive. Although Dilthey had praised Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Husserl sin-
gled out Dilthey as the chief representative of a dominant strain of thought to
which he was fervently opposed.
The occasion for this attack on Dilthey was the 1911 Essay “Philosophy as
Rigorous Science” (Husserl 1965). By that time Husserl was well known for his
Logical Investigations (1900–01), and his lectures in Halle and Göttingen had
attracted many students from around Germany and even abroad. In fact, he was
already seen as the founder and leading figure of a new philosophical movement
with a distinctive method, called phenomenological. Soon a new phenomeno-
logical yearbook would be launched, in which Husserl and many of his follow-
ers (Heidegger and Scheler are the best known) would publish some of their
major works. Husserl had inspired admiration for his meticulous and detailed
phenomenological descriptions of logical thinking and judgment; of the con-
sciousness of time; of the perception of thing and space; of fantasy. Now it was
time for the founder of the phenomenological movement to explain in system-
atic form what phenomenology was all about. The full-fledged presentation oc-
curred in 1913, with the first volume of Husserl’s Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology
and Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl 1950). As the long title suggests, the
purpose of this new work was also to explain that the new method was in a posi-
tion to address all the traditional aspects of philosophy.
Appearing on the eve of this major publication, the essay “Philosophy as Rig-
orous Science” is less programmatic and more polemical. Husserl declares that
philosophy has always aspired to be a rigorous science but has never succeeded.
And of course he tells us that phenomenology now offers a genuine hope of fi-
nally achieving that goal. But here he is more interested in denouncing two influ-
ential currents of thought, in these early years of the 20th century, that endeavor
“to weaken or to adulterate” (Husserl 1965, p. 11) the impulse to transform phi-
losophy. He calls them naturalism and historicism or worldview philosophy. They
derive respectively from the great success of natural science in the 19th century,
and from the equally impressive growth of historical knowledge. In his attack on
the second of these we encounter Husserl’s early view on the place of history in
the classical German tradition, and his view is negative.
Put very simply, the two “isms” that Husserl attacks here are two very differ-
ent forms of reductionism. Naturalism reduces everything to nature; historicism
reduces everything to history. The latter may be less extreme in that it restricts
itself to the human world of subjectivity, society, and intellectual creations. Put
in this way, Husserl’s target here seems to be precisely the views of what we have
called the Historical School. Human nature is deeply and essential historical. All
forms of human activity, including politics, social institutions, art, architecture,
music, and religion, must be understood as emerging from their historical cir-
cumstances and changing historically. To the intellectual historian and the histo-
rian of culture all this seems obvious. And Husserl does not object to this view-
point as a result of historical understanding; but he thinks that it tends to
encourage a form of historical relativism that goes beyond purely historical
conclusions.
The distinction between historicism and historical relativism can be illus-
trated by the case of religion. The efforts of 19th-century historians and theolo-
gians had been directed at understanding the roots of Christianity as a historical
and social phenomenon. There was even a search for the “historical Jesus,” the
real man behind the elusive figure of scripture. The higher criticism and the bib-
lical hermeneutics treated the sacred writings as documents of their time which
need to be read in the original languages and understood in light of the assump-
tions and prejudices of their authors. One can see how the Christian believer
might be troubled by these developments. For him or her, Christianity is eter-
nally true and universally valid beyond its changing history. Historical research
suggests that it is nothing more than a system of beliefs that grew up in particular
social and historical circumstances and has been changing ever since. In this it is
no different from other religions. Thus the historicist treatment of Christianity
might lend itself to a historical relativism of religions.
For Husserl the same problem arises for philosophy. The history of philoso-
phy can be seen as a series of intellectual constructs, each claiming to grasp the
truth for all time. Husserl can agree with this characterization, and asserts fur-
ther that no philosophy has yet achieved the status it sought. But after such a
long history of failure, it might seem plausible to conclude that the series of
claims will continue, and that the elusive goal of philosophy as rigorous sci-
ence is unrealizable. Here the line is crossed between historicism and histori-
cal relativism, and from there to what Husserl calls “worldview philosophy.”
According to the latter, the role of philosophy is not to become rigorous sci-
ence or grasp eternal truth, but simply to synthesize the highest achievements
of its time into a coherent system or worldview. A worldview is no more per-
manent than the era to which it gives expression, and will pass away with the
demise of that era.
It is easy to see the hand of Hegel in all this. Hegel believed that art, religion,
and philosophy were the highest expressions of any historical epoch. Philoso-
phy is the highest of these; like the owl of Minerva, which takes its flight at close
of day, it brings its era to a close, looking back and capturing in thought the truth
of the era that is about to pass away. But Hegel avoided the relativistic conclusion
by claiming that his own philosophy, since it captured in thought the truth of all
previous eras, was able to contain them all. But for this to be plausible one must
believe that after Hegel and his era, no further worldviews are possible. Given
Hegel’s assumptions, and absent the Hegelian synthesis, relativism seems the
only plausible conclusion.
Such is the immensely influential atmosphere of historicism that Husserl
confronts and rejects in 1910. And he takes Dilthey’s work to be emblematic. If
it is true that philosophy has hitherto failed to become rigorous, as Husserl be-
lieves, it does not follow that it never will. And in any case, we decide the failure
of philosophical claims on philosophical, not historical, grounds. Past philoso-
phies are unsuccessful not because they are past, or because they are embedded
in some historical epoch, but because they are wrong. Philosophy thus appeals
to its own standards to criticize claims and assert its own. Developing such stan-
dards, and applying them, is what phenomenology can do, and that is why it
stands a chance of being a rigorous science.
The mature phenomenology that Husserl presents in Ideas I has two distinct
characteristics. First, it is a science of essences, not of facts. Hence it must present
itself as a method for moving from the world of facts to the grasp of pure es-
sences. Second, the essences it seeks concern consciousness, so it must develop a
method for grasping the essence of consciousness in particular. This is the
method that emerges under the heading of epoche and phenomenological re-
duction. The introduction and the first section of Ideas I are devoted to the first
of these two features, and this also predominates in the account of phenomenol-
ogy we find in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.”
History, including intellectual history and the history of philosophy, Husserl
reminds us, belongs among the sciences of fact. However different it may be
from the natural sciences, it makes factual claims about the past based on empiri-
cal evidence. This evidence may take the form of documents that need to be read
critically and interpreted broadly, but the ultimate aim is to arrive at warranted
assertions about what really happened. “What really happened” may also in-
clude larger spiritual and intellectual movements, trends, and developments.
Husserl is willing to acknowledge the importance and validity of the history of

philosophy, not only as a discipline in its own right but also as a desideratum for
genuine philosophy. What he resists is the conflation of the two.
All sciences of fact, according to Husserl, presuppose and make use of es-
sences, even if they are unaware of it. They employ basic concepts, make classi-
fications of the facts, and follow logical procedures in arguing for their conclu-
sions. Facts can exist and have meaning for us only as instantiations of essence.
Carving out a discipline like history, and distinguishing it from sociology, psy-
chology, and physics, appeals implicitly or explicitly to essential distinctions
among the phenomena and entities that fall under these domains. But the pur-
pose of sciences of fact is not to dwell on these essential distinctions for their
own sake but to employ them in pursuit of factual claims, including laws and
generalizations.
Sciences of essence, by contrast, make no factual claims. They may employ
facts, real or imagined, as illustrations of the essential truths they want to ex-
press, but their purpose is to understand the essences themselves. Logic and
pure mathematics, including the mathematics of space and time, are examples of
existing sciences of essences. They do not depend on empirical intuition (sense-
experience) to back up their claims, but have their own sort of intuition—Hus-
serl calls it eidetic intuition—appropriate to their domains. Where does phe-
nomenology fit in? Husserl presents it as a theory of knowledge, dealing with
meaning, judgment, and inference, but also with perception, fantasy, and time-
consciousness. At the heart of these investigations is a theory of consciousness.
These are the topics Husserl had treated in the Logical Investigations and in the
following decade of lectures and seminars. Phenomenology treats these topics
as a science of essence. That is, its purpose is to articulate the essence of knowl-
edge, perception, etc., not to make factual claims about them.
Husserl puts a lot of emphasis on the eidetic character of phenomenology
partly because he wants it sharply distinguished from psychology. He realizes
that psychology deals with many of the same topics as phenomenology, and this
leads to misunderstandings. But phenomenology seeks essential insights into
these topics, whereas psychology is an empirical discipline. Phenomenology can
aspire to the status of philosophy only if it arrives at essential truths. If its truths
are about consciousness, they are of an altogether different order from empirical
truths.
If its eidetic approach distinguishes phenomenology from psychology, it also
separates it sharply from history. The essences sought by phenomenology are
timeless and unchanging, above and beyond the domain of historical change.
This qualifies it for the status of philosophy, indeed philosophy as rigorous sci-
ence. Reducing philosophy to history would be just as bad as reducing it to psy-
chology. To be sure, phenomenology can make essential claims about the nature
of history and historical change, and about historical knowledge. But these are
claims about history, not historical claims. And the essences brought to light,
even if they are about historical change, are not themselves subject to historical
change.
Husserl was not the only philosopher in the early decades of the 20th century
to advocate a transhistorical philosophy of essences, and to be accused of “Pla-
tonizing” tendencies. This was the feature of his work that most attracted his
earliest followers. Just as Husserl’s attack on psychologism in the Logical Investi-
gations had attracted many supporters, his attack on historicism was seen in the
same light. Husserl became the spearhead for a widespread rebellion against the
historicism that dominated not only philosophy but also the much broader in-
tellectual life in Germany at this time. The call to establish philosophy as a rigor-
ous science by recasting it as eidetic phenomenology was seen by some as a
long-awaited restoration of philosophy to its rightful place.
With the publication of Ideas I, a new dimension was added to Husserl’s con-
ception of phenomenology. The epoche and phenomenological reduction, which
lead to the idea of phenomenology as transcendental philosophy, seemed to
Husserl’s critics, and even to some of his early followers, to move in the direction
of idealism. And Husserl himself adopted the Kantian term “transcendental ide-
alism” to describe his project. But these changes did not affect, in Husserl’s eyes,
the rigorously eidetic character of phenomenology. Its aim remained that of
gaining insight into the timeless essences of consciousness, objectivity, world,
intersubjectivity, and all the other topics to which transcendental phenomenol-
ogy turned its attention. This is clear in the posthumously published books, lec-
tures, and manuscripts of the 1920s, and is equally clear in Formal and Transcen-
dental Logic and Cartesian Meditations (in a French version), books that date
from the very end of that decade.
5. Husserl’s Crisis and a Different View of History

Though he had intended to expand the German version of the Cartesian Medita-
tions as the definitive exposition of his mature thought, Husserl abandoned this
project in favor of a very different one in the early 1930s. Entitled The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, and subtitled “an introduc-
tion to phenomenological philosophy,” this new work too was intended as a de-
finitive and comprehensive presentation of Husserl’s thought—though it re-
mained unfinished at his death. And in many respects the phenomenology
presented in the Crisis is the same transcendental phenomenology Husserl had
been advocating since the appearance of Ideas I. But the manner of its presenta-
tion and the rhetorical style of Husserl’s language in the Crisis are utterly
different. What constitutes the difference is that the whole work is cast in a thor-
oughly historical register from the very start.
The theme indicated by the title, the crisis of European science, sets a his-
torical tone. Husserl is again introducing phenomenology, but he thinks the
best way to do this is to articulate a sense of current crisis and then to reflect on
the historical origins of this crisis. He then launches into a detailed account of
the origins of modern science in Galileo, with frequent references to Greek phi-
losophy and mathematics, and of the philosophers who took up and inter-
preted the new Galilean science, from Descartes to Kant. At several junctures
he justifies this historical approach by asserting that we are historical beings
through and through and can only understand ourselves and our philosophical
task by examining the heritage and tradition of modern science and philoso-
phy. Among the supplementary texts published in the posthumous edition of
the Crisis, and dating from the same period, is the Vienna lecture of 1935,
which bears the title “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” and
“The Origin of Geometry as an Intentional-historical Problem” (see Husserl
1962b, pp. 314ff. and pp. 365ff.). The former deals extensively with the origins
of science and philosophy in Greece; the second (whose title probably derives
from Eugen Fink) takes geometry as representative of all formal sciences of
space, and argues that even such abstract sciences must be traced back to their
origins in everyday experience in order to be understood philosophically. He
anticipates the objection (which might very well come from his own support-
ers) that he is “historicizing” epistemology, but defends this procedure as abso-
lutely necessary.
What is clear in all these texts is that history and historical expositions are not
extraneous window-dressing for Husserl but are, he believes, integral to the
nature and understanding of phenomenology. Above all they explain and justify
the need for phenomenology; they explain why phenomenology, and only phe-
nomenology, is in a position to fulfill the mission of philosophy. In his earlier
writings, as we’ve seen, Husserl had no objection to history, even the history of
philosophy and science, but wanted always to keep them separate from philoso-
phy proper. Now, by contrast, philosophy must proceed historically. To be sure,
Husserl also distinguishes what he is doing from mere factual history. Rather
than facts, he wants to uncover the sometimes hidden teleology in the move-
ment of history, to discern behind what happened the direction and purpose of
its movement.
Husserl’s views on history, on the historicity of science and of philosophy
itself, so much in evidence in these texts of the 1930s, seem to place him in close
proximity to the very historicism he had denounced in “Philosophy as a Rigor-
ous Science.” To be sure, it was not so much historicism, understood simply as an
insistence on the deeply historical character of everything human, that Husserl
objected to there, but rather the extension of historicism into historical relativ-
ism and “worldview philosophy.” But it is notable that in the Crisis Husserl insists
on the deeply historical character of everything human, including philosophy.
Given the distinctly historicist account of philosophy itself in the Crisis, does
Husserl still believe philosophy is capable of surmounting its historical circum-
stances and arriving at timeless and transhistorical truths?
Clearly he does; to the Urstiftung, or primal establishment of philosophy in
Greece, corresponds its Endstiftung, or final establishment. This final establish-
ment is none other than phenomenology itself, conceived not as a final doc-
trine but as a proper method with which philosophy can move forward. But
what the proper method supposedly guarantees is that philosophy can attain a
status that makes it more than an expression of its time, more than a mere
worldview. But can Husserl make good on this claim? Clearly this is what he
wants to convince his readers of. However we may answer this question, it is
clear that the writings of the 1930s constitute a significant change in the direc-
tion and nature of Husserl’s phenomenology, and that this change concerns his
conception of history.
What happens in the Crisis texts is that Husserl ceases to turn his back on
historicity and historicism and begins to take history seriously. History is not
just a series of facts that can be grasped by an empirical science, but is the ani-
mating force behind human reason, knowledge, science, and philosophy. In rec-
ognizing this Husserl changes his attitude toward this important aspect of the
classical German tradition: Rather than rejecting historicism, Husserl has, to a
certain degree, reconciled with it. At least he recognizes, indeed insists on, the
historical character of all human endeavors, including science and philosophy.
The idea of the Endstiftung seems to go farther and to reconcile Husserl even with
Hegel. Philosophy is historical, but is able to surmount its own historical status
by being the historical summation or culmination of its own history. It is also the
culmination of human history, since humanity expresses its true nature through
its philosophy. Philosophy cannot achieve its results by ignoring the past, but
must think through its past and its teleological movement.
6. Philosophy of History in the Crisis

How is this preoccupation with history to be understood? Does it constitute a
philosophy of history, and if so in what sense? How does it compare with other
approaches to history? Husserl’s approach is, I think, very hard to classify. There
are many aspects to this preoccupation with history, as many readers will know.
He advocates a historical approach to epistemology in general and to the phi-
losophy of science in particular. He deals with the history of science, and of
geometry; he devotes a long discussion to the history of philosophy; and he tries

to develop the “philosophical-historical idea of European humanity” (p. 314).
He puts forward some very interesting but extremely difficult reflections on his
own historical method of investigation. Does any of this qualify as philosophy of
history in any recognizable sense?
In earlier chapters we distinguished between the metaphysics and the epis-
temology of history. The version of this distinction, codified in the analytic phi-
losophy of the 1940s and 50s as the difference between the “substantive” and
the “critical,” was of course unknown to Husserl. But as we saw, the difference
is based on posing different kinds of questions about history. Does Husserl, in
the Crisis, raise metaphysical or epistemological questions about history? There
are in fact elements of both approaches to history in the Crisis; however, its
most interesting contribution to the philosophy of history, I believe, belongs to
neither of them. It is found, rather, as I shall try to show, in the concept of Ge-
schichtlichkeit or historicity. This is a concept we have encountered before, and
it is found in Dilthey’s and Heidegger’s as well as Husserl’s reflections on
history.
Let us first consider the Crisis texts as substantive philosophy of history. Is
Husserl advancing claims about history itself, in the manner of the classical phi-
losophies of history? One’s first impression, I think, is that this is exactly what he
is doing. He seems to be attributing a teleological structure, a direction, to his-
tory as a whole, in the manner of the grandiose 19th-century theories of Hegel,
Marx, or Comptean positivism. From his Viennese background Husserl had
inherited a certain disdain for Hegel, mentioning him rarely, and he seemed
genuinely uninterested in the fact that Hegel made important use of the term
“phenomenology.” As far as I know he never mentioned Marx. The positivist
link is more plausible, since we know of Husserl’s connection with the German
branch of Mach and Avenarius. And yet the figure who looms largest here is
Hegel, who was in any case the paradigmatic philosopher of history in the
modern period.
It is easy to find echoes of Hegel’s philosophy of history in Husserl’s text.
It is in Europe that humanity has really come into its own. Europe, Husserl
assures us, is not a geographical expression but an idea, and while the citizens
of the United States and of the “British Dominions” are accorded the status
of honorary Europeans, the Eskimos, Indians, and Gypsies, who may inhabit
those precincts, are not (pp. 318f.). Other non-Westerners, such as the Chi-
nese and “Negroes in the Congo” are mentioned, not necessarily disrespect-
fully, but clearly as outsiders. The term Geist occurs frequently in this work.
Husserl’s ideal Europe begins with Greek philosophy and culminates in the
present. He employs the term “teleology” copiously to describe this trajec-
tory, from the Urstiftung of European humanity in Greece to the Endstiftung
embodied in phenomenology itself. This culmination is viewed by Husserl as

the triumph of reason in history.
There are obvious dissimilarities, of course. Husserl’s description of this tra-
jectory is, if anything, even more idealistic than Hegel’s. For Husserl history is
driven by or even consists entirely in the progression of ideas. There is no at-
tempt, as there is in Hegel, to relate political and cultural forces to these ideas.
The drive toward freedom, which is central to Hegel’s philosophy of history,
does not figure prominently in Husserl’s account. The dialectical movement, the
cunning of reason, the role of human passions—all those flourishes which are
distinctive of Hegel’s account of the course of history seem to be missing here.
Reason alone, in the form of Wissenschaft, is the solution to humanity’s prob-
lems; and we find no positive role for religion here either. In this respect Husserl
seems closer to the Enlightenment conception, where reason overcomes the
forces of superstition, or to its later, positivist counterpart, where science (in this
case phenomenology) supplants both religion and metaphysics.
But the larger contours of Hegel’s system seem to find their counterparts in
the Crisis. The Greeks discover the distinction between reality and appearance,
nature and convention. Man moves toward the outside world, captures it in
modern objectivism, meanwhile forgetting the subjective accomplishment that
made it possible. The stage is set for a return to subjectivity, in the transcendental
phenomenological turn. Spirit others itself, returns to itself, in the familiar Hege-
lian pattern. History is the story of that departure and return. Thus we are being
told that history has a meaning, purpose, direction, in the manner of the classi-
cal, speculative philosophy of history.
Though Husserl gestures in the direction of such a philosophy of history, it
would be a great mistake to read him in this way. In fact, this classical account of
history, which places its hopes for the salvation of mankind in reason, philoso-
phy, and science, is evoked by Husserl, in the early pages of the Crisis and else-
where, as an object of bittersweet nostalgia and with a sense of loss. The Euro-
pean sciences trace their origin to a time when these ideas could still be taken
seriously, when knowledge was supposed to make us wise and give meaning to
life. But now they have been separated from each other, from the guiding ideal of
unity represented by philosophy, and above all from the ordinary human life to
which they were supposed to give meaning. This is the crisis of European sci-
ences: the loss of their meaning for life.
The term “crisis” is the telltale sign that Husserl is not presenting a Hegelian-
style philosophy of history. The idea of crisis has no place in the Hegelian
scheme. Hegel assures us that reason has triumphed, or is about to. We have
emerged from the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars
and can construct constitutional states which achieve the freedom promised by
the Enlightenment while preserving the best of the ancient monarchies. Even
religion, which the Enlightenment wanted to sweep aside, can find its place in
the new order. The crisis is over. For Marx, the revolution is not a crisis; we know
how it will turn out.
Again Husserl may seem to be closer to the milder form of the substantive
philosophy of history associated with the Enlightenment and with Kant. The
French philosophes believed in progress, and affirmed that it could be achieved
through human agency; Kant very much wanted to believe in it, but with his
usual caution argued only that it could not be ruled out and thus could legiti-
mately be hoped for and, especially, striven for.
But here too the idea of crisis has no place. We can distinguish three different
narrative strategies, as we might call them, in the modern substantive philoso-
phies of history. Hegel and Marx give us closure, a fairly clear-cut End of History
to go with its beginning and its middle. The Enlightenment’s future is still open,
but the idea of human salvation is pretty clearly implied, even if we cannot give
it a full-fledged definition. Kant thought a league of nations might do it. But the
idea of crisis places us in the middle of a fateful drama, at a turning point where
the possibility of a reversal of fortune looms large before us. The metaphor is
medical, of course: The patient is ill; things could go either way. Something must
be done. Human agency is called for in all three of these models, even the
Hegelian–Marxist one, though it is often portrayed as deterministic. But in the
case of a crisis the need is urgent: Emergency intervention is called for.
Husserl’s choice of metaphor may seem entirely apt, given the situation he
was in, lecturing in Vienna and Prague in the years leading up to the Anschluß
and the Munich conference. But in fact, as Charles Bambach (1995, p. 37) points
out, the term “Krisis” figured in the titles of several much earlier studies Husserl
probably knew about: Rudolf Pannwitz, Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur
(1917); Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus” (1922); and Die geistige
Krisis der Gegenwart (1924), by Arthur Liebert, the same man who later edited
the journal Philosophia in Belgrade, where Husserl was to publish his own Krisis
text. And Heidegger had spoken of the crisis of the sciences in his lectures of
1925, and again in Sein und Zeit (1957, p. 9). Husserl indeed admits, at the begin-
ning of the Crisis text, that the theme of the European crisis has been much dis-
cussed. Clearly the “crisis” as a historical topos belonged to the whole interwar
period, at least in central Europe, and tells us a lot about how its intellectuals
thought about what they were going through. This third narrative strategy, typi-
cal of the early 20th century, and even beyond into the Cold War period, was
lacking in the 19th century.
Still, this book is Husserl’s crisis in more senses than one. Clearly he thinks
the fate of German philosophy, as he conceives it, hangs in the balance. He never
let go of his ideal for philosophy, and he did not himself assert that the “dream”
of philosophy as a rigorous science was exhausted, as some passages seemed to
suggest. Yet the poignancy of the text as a cri de coeur, its tone sometimes close to
despair, is unmistakable. And indirectly, as we know, it is deeply personal. It is
not only that Husserl identified himself completely with philosophy. Like many
of the assimilated Jews of his generation, he considered himself a loyal champion
of Western culture and a citizen of Europe. He had converted to Protestantism at
an early age, under the influence of his youthful friend Gustav Albrecht and his
mentor Thomas Masyryk. By all accounts he took it seriously: Husserl took ev-
erything seriously, and it is almost impossible to think of cynical or self-inter-
ested motives in his case. He seems to have focused on the ethical teachings of
Jesus in the New Testament. Later he was a conservative, probably a monarchist,
and he bore the archaic title Geheimrat with great pride. One of his sons died on
the field of battle in the First World War. In a bitter disappointment, his most
gifted follower, Heidegger, who once addressed him as “lieber väterlicher Freund,”
had deserted phenomenology and was now representing the forces of irrational-
ism as a philosophical storm trooper. His dismay at what was happening was
echoed in the later testimony of other Jewish intellectuals, of his sons’ genera-
tion, like Karl Löwith, who lost one of his lungs for the Fatherland, and the
famous diarist Viktor Klemperer, a professor from Dresden and another veteran
of the First World War.
These personal themes, inextricable from the text of this work, give a special
flavor to Husserl’s historical reflections. Nevertheless, insofar as they are philo-
sophical reflections on the course of European and even world history, they can
be considered as belonging to the substantive philosophy of history. But as I
have already suggested, they are far indeed from the themes and metaphysical
claims we associate with the classical models of the 18th and 19th centuries.
7. Phenomenology and the Epistemology of History

Can Husserl’s text also be regarded as a contribution to the critical philosophy of
history? Husserl can indeed claim some credentials as an epistemologist of his-
torical knowledge, at least indirectly. Though the analytic philosophers of the
1950s tended to ignore it, the epistemology of history didn’t begin with Carl G.
Hempel. Debates about the status of historical knowledge began at about the
same time, in the 19th century, that history established itself in the academy and
historians began to claim that it was a Wissenschaft rather than merely an enter-
taining and edifying literary genre. Members of the “Historical School” (Ranke,
Niebuhr, Droysen) had a lot to say about critical methods for evaluating sources,
interpreting documents, and justifying their assertions. But the larger question
for philosophers, of course, was how the newly flourishing historical knowledge
related to that of the natural sciences, which had served as the paradigm for
e pistemology in the 17th and 18th centuries. The positivist tradition, inaugu-
rated by Comte and Mill, argued for the unity of all knowledge and tried to as-
similate history to science. Just as physics formulated laws of nature, and ex-
plained events by their means, so the science of society would seek out social
laws; history was just a case of applying these laws to the past.
Led by the neo-Kantians (Windelband, Rickert) and by Dilthey, German
philosophers opposed this view of historical knowledge, focusing on the fact
that its objects are not natural occurrences but human actions. It was with his-
tory in mind that they began to work out the idea of the Geisteswissenschaften,
maintaining the idea of the autonomy and independence of disciplines con-
cerned with human affairs, against the attempt to reduce them to something
more basic. This opposition between the positivists and the humanists contin-
ued to shape the debates about the status of historical knowledge well into the
20th century.
Husserl always sided with Dilthey and the neo-Kantians on the matter of re-
ductionism, but he wanted to work out the distinction between the Natur- and
the Geisteswissenschaften on his own phenomenological terms. Given his differ-
ences with the neo-Kantians, he drew more heavily on Dilthey, whom he re-
garded as a man of “ingenious intuition” but unfortunately not of “rigorous sci-
entific theorizing” (Husserl 1952, p. 173). Husserl began his work on this topic
in the studies for the second volume of Ideen, by developing the idea of constitu-
tion. Though he did not deal with historical knowledge directly, he did concern
himself with the difference between knowing objects in nature and knowing
persons and understanding and interpreting their actions. He developed the
idea of Natur and Geist as distinct ontological regions, each with its own material
a priori repertoire of concepts, determining basic entities, principles of individu-
ation, relations of temporality, spatiality, and causality. Moreover, he conceived
of the area of transition between these two traditional realms as a distinct region
of its own, that of “animalische Natur” or Seele where animals and humans shared
certain bodily properties, sensations, capacity for movement, and rudimentary
intentionality. His investigations here on the lived body or Leib as “center of
orientation,” as bearer of will, movement, and habit, and of visual and tactile
intentionality, served as Merleau-Ponty’s inspiration, and these and other un-
published manuscripts of the period are coming to be recognized as surpassing
in subtlety and sophistication those of the French philosopher who later appro-
priated them.
To each of these regions belongs, on the side of the observer-scientist, a dis-
tinct Einstellung, an attitude or frame of mind which brings to the experience of
each domain certain basic concepts, expectations, and forms of inference. The
general “natural attitude” of Ideen I is now subdivided into the “naturalistic atti-
tude” underlying the natural sciences; the “personalistic attitude,” c orresponding
to the Geisteswissenschaften; and a third, which Husserl does not name, which
underlies the science of psychology. One of the most important discussions here
concerns the distinction between causation in the natural realm and motivation
in the human world. The concepts of Umwelt and Welt also play an important
role in the discussion of persons.
Considered as contributions to the epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften,
these discussions, which date from the late 1910s and 20s, are certainly relevant
to the philosophy of history. However, not much of this turns up in the Crisis
itself. In fact, some of the subtlety and detail of Husserl’s manuscripts on these
subjects, especially on the distinction between Seele and Geist, gets lost during
the late period, when Husserl develops the idea of a phenomenological or inten-
tional psychology mainly in order to discuss its relation to transcendental phe-
nomenology. This is the subject matter of Part IIIB of the Crisis text, which takes
its point of departure by criticizing Kant and his successors for misunderstand-
ing the distinction between psychology and epistemology. Husserl wants to ad-
vance the idea that if intentionality is pursued to the limit, a psychological inves-
tigation of consciousness, properly understood, can transform itself into a
transcendental philosophy with a mere “change of sign” of the sort brought
about by application of the full-fledged phenomenological reduction. An inten-
tional psychology can thus function as a way into transcendental phenomenol-
ogy—a problem which concerns Husserl during this period. He explicitly criti-
cizes the Cartesian approach of his earlier works, and is looking for alternative
ways of presenting his method. These sections of the Crisis are thus devoted to
two related problems that come up elsewhere in the work: first what he calls the
“paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same
time being an object in the world” (Husserl 1962b, p.182)—that is, the problem
of transcendental versus empirical subjectivity; and second, the status of phe-
nomenology as a “first philosophy” or self-sufficient philosophical method.
As so often happens in Husserl’s programmatic texts, the detail and subtlety
one finds in the manuscripts are sacrificed to large-scale methodological issues.
What is missing here is a treatment specific to the Geisteswissenschaften, of the
sort that might include history, as well as the specifically epistemological interest
that guided Husserl’s studies on constitution. As a contribution to the epistemol-
ogy of the human sciences, the value of the Crisis is limited.
8. Phenomenology and Historicity in the Crisis

As a contribution to the philosophical reflection on history, however, the chief
value of the Crisis lies in another direction. Underlying the whole approach of
these texts is a concept that Husserl employs frequently during this period,
namely that of Geschichtlichkeit or historicity. As we know, this term also figures

prominently in Heidegger’s work as well. An important late chapter in Sein
und Zeit bears the title “Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit” (Heidegger 1957,
pp. 372ff.). In fact, since Being and Time was published in 1927, and Husserl’s
work on the Crisis dates from the 1930s, it is possible that Husserl picked up the
term from Heidegger, in spite of his negative feelings and very critical attitude
toward Heidegger’s work. A likelier story is that the importance of this term is
testimony to the influence of Dilthey on both Husserl and Heidegger. Though
Dilthey had died in 1911, the seventh volume of his collected works, which con-
tained the author’s late manuscripts on the “Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt,”
was published in 1927 (Dilthey 1970). Heidegger explicitly pays homage to
Dilthey at the beginning of his chapter on historicity (Heidegger 1957, p. 377).
Husserl was acquainted with Dilthey’s late work through his assistant Ludwig
Landgrebe (1928), and through Georg Misch (1967), who both published stud-
ies on Dilthey from a phenomenological perspective. Though Husserl had been
critical, in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” of the historical relativism he saw
in Dilthey’s work, he later paid him tribute as a theorist of the Geisteswissen-
schaften and for his attempts to found a humanistic psychology.
A clue to understanding the concept of historicity, and its relation to the epis-
temology of the human sciences, is found in a passage from Dilthey’s “Aufbau
der geschichtlichen Welt,” which we have quoted before. “We are historical
beings before we become observers of history,” Dilthey writes, “and only be-
cause we are the former do we become the latter.” For both Husserl and Hei-
degger, the concept of historicity is the result of elaborating on what it means to
say that we are “historical beings.” The epistemology of historical inquiry gives
way to an account of the historical character of experience and existence—
Bewußtsein for Husserl, Dasein for Heidegger.
But Husserl’s actual development of the concept of historicity, whatever it
may owe to Dilthey or even to Heidegger, is rooted ultimately in his own earlier
work. Specifically, it derives from his treatment of temporality and of intersub-
jectivity. As we know from the lectures on internal time-consciousness, con-
sciousness at any level, whether perceptual, imaginative, or conceptual, whether
passive or active, is a temporal flow with a retentional–protentional form. The
present is experienced against the background of a past and in anticipation of a
future. Whatever its intentional objects may be at any given moment, the inten-
tionality of consciousness takes in the past and future of those objects, of the
world, and of itself. The subject is not a substance persisting through time, or a
timeless ego hovering outside of time, but a self-constituting synthesis of tempo-
ral relations. As Husserl later developed his notion of genetic phenomenology,
he portrayed consciousness as a process of accumulating abiding convictions
and habitualities, building up a sense of world and of self. “The ego constitutes
itself for itself, so to speak, in the unity of a Geschichte,” as Husserl writes in the
Cartesian Meditations (1962a, p. 109). Here Geschichte can be taken in the sense
of an individual story or narrative of one’s own life, rather than history in the
usual sense. Similarly, Dilthey had compared the constitution of self to the com-
position and constant revision of an autobiography (Dilthey, p. 246).
History proper enters the picture with the intersubjective dimension of con-
sciousness. Though Husserl is often faulted for his treatment of intersubjectivity,
notably in the fifth Cartesian Meditation, there is no doubt that he considered
subjectivity and intersubjectivity to be essentially interrelated. Like intentional-
ity and temporality, intersubjectivity is an essential dimension of experience. It
is not as if the subject could somehow exist alone and then encounter others.
Intentionality is a perspective or point of view upon the world, and intersubjec-
tivity is the encounter and interaction with a point or points of view which are
not my own. Husserl’s brief appropriation of Leibniz’s concept of the monad, in
the fifth Meditation, though it is ultimately misleading and inappropriate, I
think, is meant to portray the subject as an element in a vast interplay of points
of view in which the objective world is constituted.
Husserl’s account gets much more interesting when he goes beyond the ab-
stract Leibnizian scheme, still in the fifth Meditation, and conceives of intersub-
jectivity in the form of concrete communities. He speaks of Vergemeinschaftung
der Monaden and coins the expression “personalities of a higher order” to de-
scribe such communities (Husserl 1962a, p. 160). In later manuscripts this is
further spelled out as “we-”intentionality, where the first-person point of view,
inseparable from phenomenology, is shown not to be limited to the first-person
singular, but can be exemplified in the first-person plural as well. The background
of the past now becomes that of the social or intersubjective past, which now
belongs to the individual subject by virtue of membership in a community.
Thus our expanded view of consciousness now includes history, so to speak,
as part of its makeup. That is, the social past figures as background of individual
and collective experience. And it does this prior to and independently of any
cognitive interest we might take in the past or even any instruction we might re-
ceive about it. This is what it means to say, in Dilthey’s words, that we are “his-
torical beings”: We are historical beings because we are conscious beings. While
the basic elements of this conception of historicity were already in place, it is left
to the Crisis texts themselves to develop them and to draw out their implications.
As we shall see, some of these implications have problematic consequences for
Husserl’s idea of phenomenology.
But we should pause at this point to consider the status of this concept of
historicity. Since it concerns not historical knowledge but historical being, it is
clearly not epistemological but ontological. This does not place it back in the
realm of the traditional, substantive philosophy of history, however, since it is
not about the being of the historical process as a whole, but about the being of
the subject. But to call it ontological is not quite correct either, at least in Hus-
serl’s usage, since the point here is not to describe persons in their material onto-
logical region of reality, as they might be treated in the Geisteswissenschaften, but
to describe consciousness phenomenologically. To put it another way, to say we
are historical beings is not merely to say we are in history, that we arrive on the
scene and then disappear at a certain point in objective historical time. It is cer-
tainly true, not only that each of us is such a being, an empirical ego, but also that
we are aware of ourselves as such. But historicity is a feature of our awareness
itself, our awareness not only of ourselves but of everything else as well. Indeed,
historicity is a feature of transcendental consciousness, as Husserl uses that word.
Whatever the term may have meant for Kant, for Husserl “transcendental”
means world-constituting, world-making, world-engendering—though not, of
course, world-creating: Only God can do that! Hence the “paradox of human
subjectivity,” mentioned earlier, of being both a subject for the world, transcen-
dental subjectivity, and an object in the world.
There is no doubt that the growing importance of historicity, in Husserl’s late
work, is evidence of the increasing concreteness with which he conceives of
consciousness. But Husserl’s conception was always more concrete than was
generally recognized. We have already mentioned his studies of embodiment,
which date back to Ideas II, and which also reappear in the Crisis. Merleau-Ponty,
and Sartre as well, were quite right to see and appreciate this aspect of Husserl’s
work. Husserl never had a problem with intentionality’s being instantiated in a
particular medium or a particular situation. It is for this reason that it can be
bodily as well as “mental” in the usual sense of that word. This is also why its
subject can also be the plural “we” as well as the singular “I.” The fact is that for
Husserl the world is constituted by an embodied and historically situated tran-
scendental subjectivity. Historicity, then, is not an ontological concept, at least
in Husserl’s sense, but belongs strictly to phenomenology, indeed transcenden-
tal phenomenology.
We have seen that historicity is not an epistemological concept, but it does
have epistemological implications. When Dilthey remarked that we are histori-
cal beings, and because we are historical beings we become observers of history,
he was saying something about historical knowledge. But he was not addressing
standard epistemological questions about grounding, validity, objectivity, evi-
dence, etc. Such questions assume that the discipline of history is already in
place, with all its interests and standards. Instead he was considering historical
inquiry as human activity and how it fits into the larger picture of human exis-
tence as a whole. He was addressing the question of why we are interested in the
past in the first place, why we should undertake to formulate questions about the
past along with methods and procedures for answering them.
Similarly, Husserl’s concept of historicity would have certain implications for

our understanding of historical knowledge. Though this is not spelled out in the
Crisis, we could interpret his view as running parallel to what he says about the
natural sciences and the life-world. Husserl’s argument is that we can only under-
stand the scientific project if we trace its cognitive accomplishments back to
their origin in the world of everyday, pre-scientific experience. Scientific knowl-
edge does not result from the interaction of a priori concepts with passive sense-
data (this is part of Husserl’s criticism of Kant) but arises out of and is directed
back to the “always pregiven” life-world. In keeping with its role as background
for modern objective natural sciences, the life-world in the Crisis is portrayed as
a pre-scientific natural world, the world of perception, perceived things, experi-
enced space-time and causality. For Husserl this is the world we inhabit prior to
and independently of the cognitive interests and activities that make up natural
science and issue in its particular interpretation of reality.
In the same way, we could say that cognitive interests and activities of our
historical disciplines presuppose a broader, human, and historical life-world
which figures in our ordinary experience whether we are historians or not. His-
torical claims and accounts do not emerge ex nihilo from the heads of historians,
but presuppose a pre-disciplinary and pre-objective sense of the past that we
share in virtue of our membership in our community. Thus just as the concept of
the life-world enables us to understand better the growth and significance of the
natural sciences, so the idea of historicity contributes to our understanding of
history as a discipline—not by showing how it explains things or by deciding
whether it is capable of making objective claims about the past, but by giving us
a sense of the larger context and background from which it emerges and differen-
tiates itself.
But for Husserl in the Crisis, the epistemological implications of the concept
of historicity are not limited to its role in historical inquiry. Historicity is an es-
sential feature of all inquiry, including scientific and even mathematical inquiry.
What this means is that, for any cognitive project, consciousness does not stand
passively before a domain of objects and then undertake on its own a theoretical
cognition of that domain. For any given individual, the enterprise of cognition
exists as a project before he or she takes it up. The engagement of the individual
in such a project presupposes membership in the community and the existence
of a tradition of inquiry. In taking up the project the individual inquirer takes
over its questions, goals, concepts, and methods. He also builds on results al-
ready obtained by others. Thus a particular science, while it is indeed pursued by
individuals, owes its undertaking in each case, as well as its capacity to progress,
to the social context in which it exists. There is, of course, a negative side to this:
To the extent that research takes the work of its predecessors for granted, it
moves farther from the original insights that motivated it. Theory can become
increasingly abstract or, as Husserl calls it, inauthentic. This can produce the
need to return to and reactivate those insights, a need which is harder and harder
to meet the farther one gets from the original source.
This is the historical and somewhat paradoxical path of inquiry that Husserl
describes in the text that has acquired the title “The Origin of Geometry.” While
there is a nod to the mythical, “undiscoverable Thales of geometry” (Husserl
1962b, p. 378) and to the problem of understanding the initial jump from the
practical mastery of space to its conceptual idealization, the primary subject of
this text is how a discipline like geometry, once it is launched, continues on its
way, how it exists as a historical continuum or tradition, and how the individual’s
mastery and eventual contribution to such a discipline depends on the tradition.
This is where the geological metaphor of sedimentation comes into play.
While Husserl seeks to exemplify the process of sedimentation by looking in
this case at one discipline, what he says applies to all endeavors that come under
the heading of Wissenschaft. Ultimately, and most interestingly, of course, it ap-
plies to philosophy itself, the one discipline which has always been supposed,
somehow or other, to encompass all the others. This is why his concern with
historicity finds its primary instantiation, in these texts, in discussing the history
of philosophy. He wants to make it clear that he is not just a historian of philoso-
phy, discussing the development of some cultural phenomenon “which might as
well be Chinese, in the end” (p. 72)—that is, as observed and described from the
outside by some Geisteswissenschaftler or anthropologist who is not involved,
who is trying to be objective. No, the history of philosophy must be approached
precisely by those who are engaged in the project, in order to understand the
project and the nature of their own engagement in it.
What Husserl realizes at the time of the Crisis is that philosophy itself is a
community with its own historical background, and to engage in it is to take up a
tradition that already exists. Rather than a static collection of eternal questions, it
exists as an ongoing inquiry; even if one is motivated to reject current solutions
and come up with new ones, one has inherited the questions from the past. The
most important philosophers, of course, have been those who come up with
new questions rather than new answers, but even they depend on the spiritual
inheritance of philosophy. This is the chief implication of the concept of histo-
ricity for Husserl, and it is a realization to which he comes rather belatedly. As I
have said before, the preoccupation with history is that which distinguishes
these late texts most of all from Husserl’s earlier work.
His attitude toward the history of philosophy had previously resembled
that of his admired model, Descartes. As he wrote in 1911, philosophy had
always aspired to be a rigorous science, but so far it had utterly failed, so why
waste time with failures? Inquiry should proceed “not from philosophies but
from things and from the problems connected with them”—von den Sachen
und Problemen (Husserl 1965, p. 71). In Ideas I, before he even got around to
introducing the phenomenological epoche, he proposed what he called the
“philosophical epoche” which means that “we completely abstain from judg-
ment respecting the doctrinal content of all pre-existing philosophy, and con-
duct all our investigations under this abstention” (Husserl 1950, pp. 40f.).
Husserl had nothing against the history of philosophy, of course, but like many
philosophers before and since, he thought one could draw a clear line between
“doing” philosophy and doing its history. Not only that: Phenomenology was
originally conceived, I think, as a kind of return to innocence, casting off the
prejudices of the philosophical tradition, and even the ultimate prejudice of
the natural attitude itself, in order to achieve a pure and unrestricted grasp of
experience.
Husserl had always recognized that it is not easy to bracket the natural
attitude—hence the laborious attention he pays to refining the phenomenologi-
cal reduction. Now he has come to recognize that historical prejudices, too, are
not easy to overcome; instead they must be reflected upon and worked through.
Now he joins that company of philosophers who believe that philosophy must
be done historically if it is to be done responsibly. All theoretical inquiry, even
that of the hardest of sciences, is intrinsically historical. This is not usually rec-
ognized by those involved; nor should it be, in the case of most disciplines, since
the point is to develop theories, not to reflect on them philosophically. But phi-
losophy, unlike other disciplines, is under the obligation to reflect on its own
nature as well as that of its subject matter, to try to understand its own proce-
dures even as it practices them.
This, of course, is where the idea of Europe comes in. Reflecting on the his-
torical community of philosophy, Husserl sees it as a European project, tracing
its origin to the Greeks. Philosophy has a beginning in a cultural time and place.
It is a cultural-historical formation. One of its distinctive features, however, ac-
cording to Husserl, is its early recognition of the distinction between cultural
particularity and universally valid truth. As a particular community, philosophy
has always tried to transcend itself and achieve a universal perspective. This para-
doxical idea—that of a universal perspective—is really Hegel’s idea of the in-it-
self-for-itself, the ideal of absolute knowledge, which surmounts its own histo-
ricity. Husserl does not affirm anything like this, much as he would like to. How
could philosophy ever know that it had freed itself from its historical prejudices?
He recognizes that this caution leads him into the vicinity of the historical rela-
tivism he criticizes in Dilthey. Perhaps philosophy, along with Europe, is in the
end nothing more than a particular cultural formation, its universalist aspira-
tions nothing but a quaint—but also sometimes dangerous—feature of its Welt-
anschauung. But just as he rejects an absolutist metaphysics, he also refuses to
accept the historicist anti-metaphysics which incoherently proclaims the
impossibility of any transhistorical truth. Phenomenology was never a meta-

physics or an anti-metaphysics, but something more like a research program, a
project. And there it remains for Husserl: as a project of universality that is aware
of its own particularity and historicity.
These considerations allow us to see why, despite all superficial similarities,
Husserl’s approach to history is so different from Hegel’s. Can we say more about
the differences between the two philosophers? And this question leads to a
second: Why did Husserl shift emphasis so dramatically when he began the
Crisis project? He never explains why he dropped the completion of the Carte-
sian Meditations in favor of the new approach. What explains it?
I raise these two questions together because I think there is one key to an-
swering both. Hegel and Husserl differ on this point because they lived in differ-
ent times. Husserl moved toward the historical recasting of phenomenology in
part because he was responding to a drastically different historical situation from
that of Hegel. Put simply, Hegel is presiding over the triumph of European civi-
lization, while Husserl is contemplating its demise. The idea of the downfall of
European civilization seems to us obvious in retrospect, given the triumph of
Nazism in Germany and the gradual slide, evident to everyone, toward a second
world war. But the phenomenon was much broader than that, in the eyes of Hus-
serl and his contemporaries. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” and Ideas I were
written on the eve of World War I. It was that war that had ushered in the decline
of Europe: Monarchies fell, political and economic upheavals were widespread,
revolutions threatened. The impending Second World War merely seemed to
ratify a trend already begun two decades before.
In the interwar period, while Husserl’s philosophy maintained many of its
pre-war, non-historical features, several things had changed:
1. Husserl obviously rethought his relationship to Dilthey, perhaps persuaded

by some of his students and aided by the appearance of Dilthey’s collected
works. Husserl rarely missed an opportunity, in his lectures at least, to praise
Dilthey for his work in understanding the humanities and developing a hu-
manistic psychology. He may likewise have gained respect for Dilthey’s
views on history.
2. In 1927, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit appeared. This opened a new chapter in the
vexed relationship between these two thinkers. Husserl had earlier seen Hei-
degger as his most gifted successor, and he must have had high hopes for the
new work, appearing in Husserl’s phenomenological yearbook, and dedi-
cated to Husserl. It took several years for him to realize that Heidegger was
off on a path of his own that could hardly be seen as a continuation of Hus-
serl’s work. As we have noted, Heidegger gave an important place in his work
to the concept of historicity, and while Husserl eventually rejected Hei-
degger’s whole approach, he may have thought that he should address his-
tory in his own way.
3. The crisis theme had not been entirely absent in Husserl’s earlier work. He
had often expressed his view that philosophy was in crisis and that only phe-
nomenology could save it. It took the cataclysmic events of the interwar
period to convince Husserl that the crisis of philosophy was a crisis of civili-
zation, that the scientific ethos was the essence of “European” civilization,
and that philosophers were the functionaries of mankind.
4. Internally, as we have seen, Husserl’s phenomenology tended to take up
themes closer to the topic of history. Intersubjectivity, social existence, and
the temporality of the social all appeared in Husserl’s work in the 1920s. And
Husserl’s views on the history of modern philosophy were expressed in at
least one lecture course of the period.
My claim or conjecture, then, in reconstructing Husserl’s motives is that these

topics combined with the external circumstances of his time to turn his attention
toward history in the 1930s, in such a way that it assumed a central place in his
conception of phenomenology. It is in this way that Husserl’s path finally rejoins
that of the historicism of German philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
9. Coda: French Phenomenology and History

When Husserl died in 1938, his phenomenology was largely eclipsed in Ger-
many. As a Jew he was a non-person under Hitler’s regime, and he had to publish
the finished portions of the Crisis text outside Germany. Heidegger, a rising star
in Nazi Germany, had abandoned both Husserl and phenomenology as his work
moved in new directions. But the thread of phenomenology was taken up in
France, where a brilliant group of young philosophers was drawing inspiration
from Husserl and the tradition he had founded. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas were
the best known of a generation which began its apprenticeship in the 1930s
under the sign of phenomenology. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur were the
three who remained closest to the phenomenological tradition, in spite of con-
siderable differences among themselves, and each had a significant encounter
with history.
Sartre’s early work on the imagination and on the ego was deeply influenced
by Husserl, and Heidegger played an equally important role in his magnum opus,
Being and Nothingness of 1943. Merleau-Ponty’s major work, Phenomenology of
Perception (1945), seems directly to take up the mantle of Husserl. Ricoeur
spent years as a prisoner of war furtively translating Husserl’s Ideas I into French,
publishing it with a long introduction after the war.
But if we are to understand the role of history in the thought of these phi-
losophers, we must take note of another phenomenon of French intellectual life
in the 1930s and 40s, namely the role of Marx and above all the new reception of
Hegel. Alexandre Kojève (1969) gave a series of very influential lectures on
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the 1930s, and in 1946 Jean Hyppolite pub-
lished both a translation of Hegel’s work and a two-volume study called Genesis
and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1969). Three things were signifi-
cant about these elaborate treatments of Hegel: First, they focused almost exclu-
sively on this early (1807) work of Hegel’s, all but ignoring the later, full-blown
idealistic system of Hegel’s mature thought. Second, both authors acknowledged
that they were reading Hegel’s phenomenology in light of 20th-century phe-
nomenology. Hegel is thus seen as a precursor of Husserl and Heidegger, and is
given honorary, if anachronistic, membership in the constellation of contempo-
rary thought. This is a connection that had not been made in Germany. Third,
both Kojève’s and Hyppolite’s readings of Hegel were deeply influenced by their
views of Karl Marx.
Marx was of course the inspiration behind the Socialist and Communist
parties of Europe, and since 1917 his thought had been preserved under glass,
embalmed, like Lenin’s corpse, by the ideologues of the Soviet Union. West-
ern thinkers wanted to look deeper, and Marx’s newly discovered early writ-
ings revealed a more humanistic, less rigid thinker than that of the official
Soviet and Communist Party line. Above all these writings made clearer the
link between the early Marx and the Hegel of the Phenomenology, especially in
the section of that work devoted to the dialectic of master and servant. This
was the connection emphasized by Kojève in his lectures, and by Hyppolite in
his book.
What effect did the emergence of this Hegelianized Marx, or Marxified Hegel,
have on the thinking of the French phenomenologists? This effect is perhaps
most clearly seen in Merleau-Ponty’s work. His Phenomenology of Perception
(1945) is best known for its elaborate demonstration that the true subject of
perception is not the mind but the lived body. His phenomenological descrip-
tions permit us to conceive of the human body not as an objective thing in space
but as the subjective origin of perceived space and the perceived world. Fighting
a two-pronged attack on scientific “objectivism” and “intellectualism”—that is,
the reduction of experience to the thought of a disembodied spirit—Merleau-
Ponty uses his account of perception as the basis for a wide-ranging discussion
that extends far beyond perception. The later parts of the Phenomenology of Per-
ception cover such topics as language, other people and the human world, and
freedom.
It is here, and in essays published in the 1940s and 50s, that Hegel and Marx,
as he reads them, play a role in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. He believes that these
thinkers allow us to understand human social and political relations in all their
concreteness, and to avoid objectivizing them into a mechanical process, on the
one hand, or an ideal, rational unity on the other. In other words, they are phe-
nomenologists who can cast light on the social world just as Husserl does for the
world of perceptual experience. Hegel’s dialectic portrays social relations as a
struggle for recognition, and Marx’s concept of class allows us to view the social
world not in terms of how we think of ourselves but in terms of concrete eco-
nomic realities.
Hegel’s and Marx’s views of the social world entail a certain view of history,
though for Merleau-Ponty it is very different from the standard views associ-
ated with their names. He rejects the idealistic “end-of-history” conception at-
tributed to the mature Hegel, but he believes that Hegel’s account of the strug-
gle for recognition, and of the dialectic of oppression and liberation, allows us
to understand the movement of history. Marx’s theory of class struggle and
revolution likewise becomes a means of understanding the movement of po-
litical and social forces, though Merleau-Ponty rejects the historical determin-
ism associated with official Marxism. This mild form of Marxism, with its
Hegelian flavor, was shared by many on the non-communist left in France
during the postwar years, and in Merleau-Ponty’s hands it enriched the phe-
nomenological tradition even as it allowed Marxism to be integrated with a
concrete account of everyday experience. As a philosophy of history it bears
some resemblance to the ideas of historicity we find in Dilthey, Heidegger, and
the late Husserl.
Merleau-Ponty gradually grew skeptical of the Marxist approach in the course
of the 1950s, while Sartre, his sometime friend and collaborator, rushed to em-
brace it. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), which came to be seen as the
primary philosophical statement of French existentialism, seemed to reject
Marxism as fervently as it rejected psychoanalysis and Christian theology.
Deeply indebted to Husserl and Heidegger, the work is subtitled “A Phenome-
nological Essay in Ontology.” It does share in the appropriation of Hegel into
20th-century phenomenology (one section is entitled “Hegel, Husserl, Hei-
degger”), but this is felt primarily in the importance of the notions of negation
and negativity in Sartre’s account of consciousness and “human reality.” Also of
Hegelian origin is his use of the expressions “being-for-itself ” (consciousness)
and “being-in-itself ” (everything else) as the foundation of his ontology. But
Sartre’s book is focused on the individual’s struggle for meaningful existence in
the face of inauthenticity or “bad faith.” Social existence is viewed largely as a
hostile realm in which individual freedom is sacrificed to the objectifying gaze of
the other. History seems far from Sartre’s concern.
Sartre’s view of Marxism evolved considerably during the postwar years. By

1960, when he published his second major philosophical work, the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, he was ready to declare his allegiance to Marxism as the phi-
losophy of history, and offered his Critique as providing an existential underpin-
ning, a philosophical anthropology that Marxism, in his view, lacked. Here we
find a rich account of social relations and struggles, using historical examples, as
much inspired by Marx as by the “phenomenological ontology” brought for-
ward from his earlier work. This huge work of Sartre’s is, among other things,
testimony to the tenacious hold that Marxism had on French thought during
these years.
Paul Ricoeur was not as closely identified with Marxism and with Hegel as
most of his contemporaries. From his early work on Husserl, he had sought to
expand the horizons of phenomenology by emphasizing the need for interpret-
ing, rather than merely describing, human experience. He thus followed through
on the Heideggerian notion of a hermeneutical phenomenology, which he
applied first to the realm of religious symbolism, then to the domain of psycho-
analysis. Ricoeur’s work was always characterized by an openness to contempo-
rary currents of thought, such as structuralist theories of language, analytic
philosophy, and literary theory. His interest in language and literature culmi-
nated in two major works of the 1970s and 80s, The Rule of Metaphor, and Time
and Narrative. It is in the latter work (1984–88) that Ricoeur makes a significant
contribution to the philosophy of history.
Ricoeur’s encounter with history initially concerns the epistemology of his-
torical knowledge and the language of historical narrative. Following the lead of
certain analytic philosophers of history (Danto, Gallie, Mink), Ricoeur believes
that narrative is not merely the form in which historical knowledge is communi-
cated but constitutes a cognitive instrument or framework which guides histori-
cal research. Thus the best way to understand history is not by comparing it to
science but by recognizing it as a literary genre. Ricoeur goes beyond this analy-
sis, and rejoins his phenomenological roots, by emphasizing the temporality of
narrative and construing it as our chief means of bringing order to our experi-
ence of time. As he puts it in Time and Narrative, “time becomes human to the
extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full
meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (p. 52). Analyzing
works of both historical and fictional narrative, Ricoeur transcends the episte-
mological framework by viewing history not so much as a mode of knowledge
as a way of rendering coherent our experience of time.
In one of his last works, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), Ricoeur views
history not so much through narrative as through memory. On this view our rela-
tion to the past is not mediated by a literary form but is an extension of our
direct experience. It also has ethical dimensions, and Ricoeur explores notions
of obligation and responsibility to the past, especially to the suffering victims of

past injustice. Throughout his long career, though the sources of his thought are
many, and his work represents a vast synthesis of many intellectual currents,
Ricoeur continues to refer to his work as phenomenological; Husserl’s lectures
on time-consciousness, for example, almost always turn up as part of his discus-
sions of time and memory. Though he was never doctrinaire or orthodox in any
sense, Ricoeur always retains a certain phenomenological sensibility, and his
wide-ranging work is testimony to the continuity of the phenomenological tra-
dition through the tumultuous interplay of 20th-century thought.
10. Conclusion
In this chapter, we have examined the views on history that have emerged in the
phenomenological tradition, and our focus has been on its founder, Edmund
Husserl. We looked at the background of German historicism that framed Hus-
serl’s views, and at some of his contemporaries and successors, primarily Hei-
degger and certain French phenomenologists, who carried the phenomenology
of history in new directions. We have not tried to give a comprehensive account
of what thinkers in the phenomenological tradition have had to say about his-
tory. We have not mentioned Jan Patocka, for example, a student of Husserl’s
who began reflecting on history under the influence of Husserl’s late work. Pa-
tocka combined an ethics of responsibility, based on ideas from Husserl, with
important concepts from Greek philosophy, in his reflections on history. These
ideas are important but would have taken us too far from the mainstream of
20th-century phenomenology.
Nonetheless, even those phenomenological encounters with history treated
here have varied a lot, just as their authors have differed from each other. Is there
any way to sum them up in a general way? I think the term “historicity,” which we
have encountered so often along the way, is the key to understanding these en-
counters. In various ways phenomenologists have recognized and given an ac-
count of the thoroughly historical character of consciousness, experience,
human existence. Human beings are not just in history, in the sense that they
turn up at a particular time on the world calendar. Rather, their relation to the
social and historical past is part of what they are; it is a fundamental dimension
of their experience and their existence. In a sense, historicity is a combination of
sociality and temporality, both essential features of our experience. We live in a
social world and the social world has a past, and a future, that exceed our lifespan
and our direct experience. This is something we are aware of, something which
informs our existence and enriches our lives whether or not we become histori-
ans and turn our cognitive attention to the past.
Thus the phenomenological contribution to the philosophy of history differs

from what usually goes by that name. It is neither a speculative account of the
overall course of history, of the sort associated with Hegel’s philosophy of his-
tory, nor merely an epistemology of historical knowledge, since it traces the con-
ditions of such knowledge to the underlying historicity of experience.
Most of Husserl’s successors have not shared his initial worry that this em-
phasis on historicity would lead to a relativistic and skeptical worldview philoso-
phy. Some critics may believe this is where phenomenology leads. But this may
be seen as an extra-phenomenological, perhaps metaphysical concern. Even
Husserl, though he continued to worry about this in his late work, seemed to put
it aside in favor of a relentless and thorough phenomenological description of
historicity.
VII
Space, Time, and History

This chapter contains two separate studies on the role of space and time in his-
torical experience. For reasons that will become clear, we will speak primarily of
“place” rather than “space.” In the first study the investigation is directed toward
the idea of cultural time, an idea that is directly relevant, as should be evident
from earlier chapters, to the concept of history. The second deals with notions of
“place and time” that are taken for granted in historical studies.
As these two investigations were developed independently of the earlier parts
of this work, and of each other, they constitute different perspectives on the
topics that concern us here. As such they complement what has gone before
without being directly integrated with it. What they have in common with earlier
chapters is their concern with the experience of history, their phenomenological
approach, and their attempt to demonstrate that historical concepts and histori-
cal knowledge are founded in historical experience.
1. Time Zones: Phenomenological Reflections

on Cultural Time
In this study I want to explore the idea of cultural time. I begin with the distinc-
tion between lived (or experienced) space and objective space, and with the idea
of lived space expanding into cultural space. I then consider the possibility of
finding parallels in the experience of time. After outlining my idea of the cultural
experience of time, I shall explore certain cultural differences based on different
experiences of time. I conclude with some reflections on the relation between
such cultural differences and the contemporary world.
a. Space and Place, Home and Beyond

It was Husserl who introduced us to the distinction between lived space and
objective space, a distinction made possible by the phenomenological reduc-
tion. Only if we suspend our naïve belief in the reality of objective space, which
requires that we explain everything, including our own experience, in its terms,
can we recognize and appreciate the distinctive character of experienced space
173
and its difference from and its founding relationship to our concept of objective
space. Heidegger carried the investigation a few steps farther, but it was
Merleau-Ponty who recognized what Husserl had already seen but Heidegger
ignored, namely that lived space is rooted in, and cannot be understood apart
from, the lived body. This recognition has widespread implications for phenom-
enology, as we all know. Subjectivity itself must be understood as embodied,
and the world is at its most fundamental level an Umwelt: a world of spatial ori-
entation that reveals itself in response to our movements, not just to our percep-
tual observations.
The phenomenology of lived space, with its emphasis on embodiment, is but
one area of investigation that was originally inspired by Husserl and to which
many others have made valuable contributions since Husserl’s time, some
closer to and some farther in spirit and style from Husserl’s own work. In more
recent times, phenomenologists have looked at space in a broader context.
Edward Casey’s books Getting Back Into Place (1993) and The Fate of Place
(1997) and Anthony Steinbock’s Home and Beyond (1995) are particularly
striking examples. The works of these two philosophers are very different in
style and content (in spite of the teacher–student relation between the two au-
thors), and I may be doing a disservice to the particular originality of each by
bringing them under one heading. But I think it can be said that they both seek
to extend the notion of lived space into the intersubjective, social, and espe-
cially the cultural realms.
Casey’s distinction between space and place, which serves as the concep-
tual foundation for his wide-ranging work, is introduced by saying that “we
don’t live in ‘space,’ . . . instead, we live in places” (p. xiii). Like Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty he puts the emphasis on the lived, but it must be noted that
the subject here is not I but We. Most phenomenological discussions of lived
space, linked as they are to the body, have tended to center on the individual.
Many follow Husserl’s practice of speaking in the first-person singular. Though
he includes a discussion of embodiment, Casey’s work is from the start inter-
subjective in character. Place is the lived space not primarily of individuals
but of groups; subjectivity is still embodied but is also plural. The life that is
lived in this context is the life that we live together, and it is in our place that
we do this.
Steinbock, whose work is much more closely tied to Husserl’s than Casey’s is,
moves right away to the intersubjective dimension of phenomenology, and from
there to Husserl’s distinction between Heimwelt and Fremdwelt. With its focus on
the home/alien distinction and on such notions as terrain and territory, Stein-
bock’s work can be seen primarily, though certainly not only, as a phenomenol-
ogy of social and cultural space, the lived space that is lived not just by the indi-
vidual but by the group or community.
Space, Time, and Hi stor y 175
b. Lived Space, Lived Time

Husserl also introduced us to the distinction between objective time and lived
time. Again, the phenomenological reduction plays a crucial role. Indeed, his
bracketing of objective time, in the early lectures on the phenomenology of in-
ternal time-consciousness (Husserl, 1966), is regarded by some scholars as the
first more or less explicit formulation of the reduction. Husserl invites us to con-
sider our experience of time, and time as experienced, but again, not in order to
contrast it with or explain it by reference to time-as-it-really-is. Rather than
simply taking objective time for granted, which would force us to integrate expe-
rienced time into it, Husserl’s phenomenology seeks to show how objective time
arises out of our experience. Temporal differences and dimensions are first of all
elements of our experience, and can be described in terms of our experience.
Husserl seeks what he calls the “origin” of time, but what he means by this is not
some temporal origin (which would again presuppose objective time), but rather
the directly given or originär encounter with time. We often seek to represent
time, usually by drawing a line; but in doing so we represent something that has
been presented beforehand in experience. It is this direct encounter with time
that Husserl seeks to describe in his lectures. Here we find Husserl the phenom-
enologist at his most brilliant, introducing some of his most striking concepts,
such as that of the comet-tail, the triad of impression–retention–protention, and
the distinction between retention and recollection.
Like his phenomenology of lived space, Husserl’s phenomenology of lived
time has prepared the way for a whole new approach to time in 20th-century
Western philosophy, especially after it was appropriated by Heidegger in Sein
und Zeit. French philosophy, especially in Levinas and Ricoeur, has added new
dimensions to the phenomenology of time which take us far beyond the inves-
tigations of both Husserl and Heidegger, even though it remains indebted to
them. What I do not see in this development, however, is the kind of extension
of the phenomenology of time that would correspond to the expanded phe-
nomenology of space carried out by Casey and Steinbock. How can we move
from lived time to cultural time? In what sense, if any, would such a move be
parallel to the phenomenology of cultural space?
Before I move directly to this topic, I will say a few words about the connec-
tion between time and space as they are treated phenomenologically. Husserl
initially sought to exclude space from his analysis of time, directing us to ignore
the spatiality of sound, for example (the fact that the tone emanates from a violin
over there across the room), and treat it as a pure sense-datum. Recall too that in
these same years, Henri Bergson was warning against the tendency to think of
time in spatial terms. But the reader of Husserl’s lectures is struck by the fact that
from the very start he depends very heavily on spatial terminology, spatial
metaphors, and spatial comparisons to carry out his description. Just as I do not
experience pure space but things in space, so I experience time through what he
calls “temporal objects” (melodies and the like). As I hear the melody tone by
tone, it is as if I were seeing the same thing from different points of view. Thus
the temporal object, like the spatial thing, has its internal horizons as well as its
external horizons. In general, the concepts of foreground and background, inter-
preted temporally rather than spatially, play a large role in Husserl’s lectures, and
the foreshortening effect of spatial distance from the observer is said to have its
counterpart in the experience of time. Starting from the now rather than the
here, there seems to be something like a “temporal field,” comparable to the spa-
tial field, spreading out around me. And Husserl comes up with his famous “dia-
gram of time” which is, of course, a spatial representation.
It should be clear that the space to which Husserl appeals for these compari-
sons and metaphors is not objective space—which is what Bergson was worried
about—but precisely the lived space to which his own phenomenological analy-
ses, in these same years, were devoted. In part this appeal derives from the ordi-
nary language of time, where we constantly use terms like long and short, near
and far, distance, segments of time, etc. But there is also a lack of terminology at
certain crucial junctures (“for all this,” Husserl writes [Husserl 1966, p. 79] in
frustration at a particularly important point in his manuscript, “we lack names”),
which sends him in search of metaphors, something he does with a certain
amount of distaste. But above all this mixture attests to the fact that these two
dimensions of experience cannot be separated, except abstractly, whereas what
we are trying to capture is the precisely the concrete.
The parallelism of lived space and lived time leads us to the very heart of
subjectivity itself. Just as the spatial “here” is absolute, representing the “zero-
point of orientation” around which all of space arranges itself, no matter where I
am, so the “now” is absolute as well, the “place,” as it were, where I am always lo-
cated, even though the content of the now is always changing. Just as the space of
my surroundings extends indefinitely in all directions, so time, with its two-fold
horizon, extends indefinitely into the past and the future. Opposed to the here is
the there; to the now the then. The present, which is both spatial and temporal,
stands out against its background: the absent, in the case of space, the past and
future, in the case of time.
c. The Universal Now

If we seek now to extend the phenomenology of lived time from the subjective
to the intersubjective and thence to the cultural, we may, like Husserl, expect to
find useful parallels with lived space. But at a crucial point the parallel seems to
break down.
For Husserl and many of his successors, the phenomenology of space is the
entrance gate to alterity and intersubjectivity. Husserl’s attempts to deal with the
experience of the other subject, in the fifth Meditation and elsewhere, are firmly
grounded in his phenomenology of spatial perception. If the here is my perma-
nent and absolute location as a perceiver, the there is the location of the other, a
place in my environment where, in the strict sense, I can never be. The there-ness
of the other both instantiates and symbolizes the otherness of the alter ego: It is
the concrete manifestation of the fact that to experience the other is to have
before me a subjectivity which is not my own, a point of view on the world which
in principle I cannot occupy. Most phenomenologists reject the Levinasian view
that this otherness shows us the limits of intentionality and ultimately of phe-
nomenology itself. This view seems based on the mistaken assumption, common
throughout the history of epistemology, that in order to experience and know
something I have to become that thing, or it has to become me, thus obliterating
the distinction between me and the object, or reducing the other to the same.
But this is just the mistake that the concept of intentionality is designed to over-
come. The irreducible otherness and thereness of the other person is precisely
the sense the other person has in my world. That sense does not make the other
inaccessible, any more than the appearance of a thing is a barrier, a second thing,
standing between me and the thing-in-self. Rather, that sense is my access, which
reveals the other to me even if my access is limited.
Those limits are set aside, though they are never completely overcome, where
ego and alter constitute a community, however small, however fleeting. Existing
not somehow above or apart from, but through, the individuals that make them
up, communities can be seen as “personalities of a higher order,” as Husserl calls
them (1950, p. 160). Here subjectivity, as conceived phenomenologically, once
again demonstrates its flexibility: Just as it must be seen as embodied in the con-
text of individual perception, here it becomes plural, and the first-person singu-
lar is replaced by the we-subject. But more than that: This we-subject exists in
relation to a common world, or rather, common surroundings. It is not merely
the subject that becomes plural: Remarkably, the here and the there become
plural as well. No less absolute for being intersubjective, the here is now the place
of the community, the territory of our communal life; it is where we live. The
there now represents not the individual but the communal other. By this means
we arrive at the distinction between the home world and the alien world. Thus
in the intersubjective as in the subjective sphere, space has a dual role: It pro-
vides the access to the other even as it reveals the otherness of the other. By set-
ting up the limits between me (or us) and the other, it constitutes the sense the
other has for me or us.
But if we look now for something parallel in the sphere of time, a curious
disparity seems to open up. Whereas the absolute here separates me from you, us
from them, the absolute now seems not to function in this way. I am (we are)
always here, you are always there. I am always now, but . . . so are you. There is
something odd about saying, in parallel to the “I am here,” “I am now.” We would
be more inclined to say “it is now,” and this “it” seems to signal the utter, absolute,
impartial universality of time. Time, as we might say, is no respecter of persons;
it is not linked to a point of view. The here, we might say, can be shared by the
members of a community, but not by everyone. The community must define
itself by reference to the others, and likewise the here must define itself by refer-
ence to the there. But the now, it seems, is in principle shared, not just by you and
me, us and them, but by everybody everywhere, even those who don’t figure at
all in the cultural geography of the here and the there.
What are we to make of this apparent disparity? Does it signal a radical dif-
ference between time and space, in spite of their interwovenness and in spite
of the many parallels we can find between them? Perhaps time is the dimen-
sion of human existence that is destined not to divide us, as space does, but to
unite us all, to bring home to us our oneness with all mankind. Just think for a
moment of all the billions of people we have never seen, in places we will never
know, who are nevertheless united with us by this one bond: We are all now,
we all share the absolute center of time. One phenomenologist who tried to
grapple with the intersubjective dimension of time, Alfred Schutz, found a
striking expression for this shared dimension: “We grow older together”
(Schutz 1967, p. 165). But if time, construed in this way, signals no difference
between me and the other, it also seems to have no role in my access to the
other. On this view of time, I share the now not only with those near and far,
friend and foe, but also with others to whom I have no concrete relation what-
soever, of whose existence I know only by hearsay, who are, for me, little more
than an abstract idea.
d. Time and the Other

Now I want to argue that the discrepancy we have just been discussing between
space and time is merely apparent, and that if we accept it our phenomenology
of lived time and culture will have taken a wrong turn. The discrepancy, it seems
to me, is the result of a mistake that often creeps into phenomenological discus-
sions when we forget the distinction between the lived and the objective. We
are misled partly by our ways of speaking, but also by the great strength of the
hold that the objective prejudice has on our thinking. We share the absolute
and universal now with everyone and everything in the universe in the same
sense that we share universal and objective space with everyone and every-
thing. That is something we know, but it not something we experience. In the
case of space, that is a sense of sharing that precisely overlooks the differences
that phenomenology is supposed to attend to: differences of perspective, differ-

ences of point of view.
What we have to remind ourselves is that the phenomenological now is not an
abstract point on a scale, whether as one of an endless sequence of numbered t’s
or as points on the circular face of the clock. These are ways of representing time,
not ways of experiencing it. In experience, what is now is the event I am actually
living through. To repeat what we said before, I experience time by experiencing
what Husserl calls “temporal objects”—that is, by participating in events that
exist by taking time. Like the paradigmatic melody, to be what they are they
must unfold in time, and to experience them I must grasp their unfolding. On
Husserl’s analysis, this means that the now is given against the background of the
not-now which is first of all the just-past. This is what Husserl calls retention, and
no less important, though Husserl does not devote enough attention to it, is the
anticipatory grasp that he calls protention. These are the horizons of temporal
experience, and together with the present they make up the temporal field. As
with space, this field is not an empty array of abstract points but is occupied by
events just as the spatial field is inhabited by things. It is through things and
events that I experience space and time.
What this means is that my experience of time is a function of the events that
I live through, the events, that is, that are meaningful or significant for me. It is
these events, not abstract points on a scale, that are ever receding into an indefi-
nite background and make up the horizon of my past. And it is the events that
figure in the immediate sphere of protention or anticipation, and not some ab-
stract empty spaces to be filled in, that make up the horizon of my future. For the
individual, events can be meaningful or significant such that I not only live
through but also remember them—and here we come to Husserl’s distinction
between primary and secondary memory or between retention and recollection.
Likewise, future events can be of such importance that I explicitly look forward
to or dread them, that I plan for them or seek to avoid them. This is the horizon
of “secondary expectation” which is somehow a counterpart of recollection. The
point of all this is that these primary and secondary horizons of past and future
form the complex background against which the “now” stands out and from
which it derives its significance. Like a single note in a melody, the present is
nothing by itself; it is what it is thanks to its “place” (a spatial metaphor again) in
the melody, its role in the unfolding whole of which it is a part.
If we look at our experience of time in this way we begin to see how we might
move from subjective to intersubjective time, from individually lived time to so-
cially or culturally lived time. As an individual, I am engaged in a present that is
determined by its place among the events, past and future, of my own life. These
are its horizons of retention and protention, horizons of memory and expecta-
tion. From the individual point of view you and I do indeed occupy different
presents, because we lead different lives, because we have different pasts and
futures, and because the present is for each of us a function of the past and future
events which frame it. In this sense your “now” is as much a mark of your other-
ness and differentness from me as is your spatial “there,” because it is a point of
view on a different time, a past and future which are different from mine. In that
sense it is a temporal point of view which in principle I can never occupy. It
opens out, as it were, onto a different field, and just as I cannot have your percep-
tions, see the world from your vantage point, so I cannot have your memories or
your expectations. To do that I would have to be you. But again, from that fact
that I cannot be you it does not follow that I cannot know you. Though I cannot
have or share your memories, I can know about them and thus about you. Your
very sense as other is the sense that gives me access to you.
e. Local Time, East and West

Thanks to this access, you and I can be members of a community, and this gives
us a completely different access to time. Just as the here can be shared, so can the
now. But in this case it is defined by the events that we live through together. It is
in this sense that we can have a shared past and a common future. With regard to
the past, instead of speaking of memory we are more likely to speak of history
and tradition. As members of a community, individuals participate in a temporal-
ity that reaches beyond their own experience, extending into the past before
their births and into the future after their deaths. And so it is that the temporal
field of subjective lived time opens out onto a larger field of social and cultural
lived time. What we do and suffer together, the events we live through and the
actions we perform, stand out from and get their sense from the larger cultural
horizons of past and future. The time we experience is not universal time, it is
our time—local time. That is, it is linked to our place.
Here the spatial duality of the here and the there, as it is extended into the
social and cultural spheres, has its counterpart in the temporal differences of past
and future. The otherness of an alien culture is at least in part a function of its
having a different past and a different future. But this difference, in both space
and time, is more than just a factual difference. Different communities, under-
stood as different points of view on the world, also have different ways of con-
struing or structuring space and time generally. One of the many merits of
Casey’s work lies in showing different ways of according significance to space—
different attitudes toward bodily space, differences between sacred and profane
sites, between the settled and the wild, between surrounding nature as habitation
or adversary to be tamed, etc. In the same way we can discern different attitudes
toward time. Even personal time may differ according to cultures, or indeed the
distinction between private and public time. There are shared attitudes toward
the speed or slowness of time, and even toward the measurement of time and the
importance of objective time itself. Here I am thinking of attitudes toward punc-
tuality and the meanings of expressions like “a little while” or “a long time” in
different cultures. Certain English expressions (and Heidegger has dealt with
German equivalents) treat time as a commodity or currency: We spend it,
borrow it, save it, lose it, waste it, earn it, gain it, even try to kill it—though in the
end it gets us. Clearly these suggest rich possibilities for anthropological and so-
ciological empirical research. The best phenomenology can do is indicate broad
structural differences.
Clearly time is experienced in the ways we divide it up, the manner in which
we structure it in terms of events and the patterns of events. What is our rela-
tion to our own past? As we experience the cultural present becoming the cul-
tural past, what is more important, sameness or difference, continuity or
change? This is the place to consider the well-worn distinction between cycli-
cal and linear conceptions of time. Time is change; but is change significant or
insignificant? Does the present differ from the past or only repeat it, to be itself
repeated again in the future? Is cultural life centered in the rituals of commem-
oration, which suppress difference and elevate the same, or does culture cele-
brate change? A linear conception of time is often thought of as a narrative or
a historical conception, but this can in turn be construed in different ways.
Our cultural community can be seen as advancing from its originating founda-
tion toward the fulfillment of a set of ideals in the future, or as a steady decline
from a past golden age. Is civilization progressive, somehow inclining toward
triumph over adversity, or is it heading downhill toward some ultimate
catastrophe?
It is a cliché when speaking of temporality and historicity to associate the
linear, narrative, or historical conception of time with the West and the Judeo-
Christian tradition in particular. By contrast, even the Greek worldview shares
the supposedly cyclical form with traditional East and South Asian cultures. Ac-
tually, the picture is much more complicated than this. The cycles of nature and
the seasons are important in any culture. And consider the cultural importance
of the sequence of generations, which is cyclical in the sense that children
become parents, who in turn have children, etc. Nor should one think that the
cyclical in the West is restricted to the cultural significance of nature. It is cer-
tainly possible to find cyclical elements in the Christian and Jewish calendars,
not only in the cycle of liturgical seasons but also in the form of ritual commemo-
rations conceived as repetitions of sacred events. Thus cyclical features have tra-
ditionally played an important part in the Western structuring of cultural time.
It is true, however, that in the West there is an underlying chronological se-
quence represented by the reckoning of the Christian era. This was reflected in
the ancient tradition of annals and chronicles. Laid over this is the practice of
naming eras after the kings, princes, and emperors who ruled over them. From
this we can distinguish in turn the kind of periodization which results from ex-
plicitly historical reflection, and which results in such terms as Middle Ages, Re-
naissance, Enlightenment, etc.
According to the work of Masayuki Sato, in China as in Japan the system of
era names or dynastic periodization, discontinued in China after the 1911 revo-
lution, was in nature not radically different from the era names traditionally used
in Europe in connection with annals and chronicles. Both are ways of compart-
mentalizing or structuring the flow of time with reference to political and social
realities. The difference lay in the absence in East Asia of an underlying chrono-
logical sequence. Political and social history was not superimposed on chronol-
ogy but rather on the traditional sexagesimal or sixty-year cycles. This means
that what lay at the root of temporality was not a linear sequence but a system of
recurrent time.
f. Conclusion: Cultural Time and the Contemporary World

These cultural differences do indeed suggest importantly different ways of con-
struing the passage of time. Several remarks must be made about this brief com-
parison, however.
First, it should be noted that the Christian era is not merely a chronological
reckoning, but is itself an era name derived not from a secular but from a divine
ruler. It is true that in many cultures rulers have considered themselves and been
considered divine, and their relation to the naming of eras has something to do
with their divinity. In this sense the Christian conception conforms to a familiar
pattern, even though there are again important differences.
Second, and this is a related question, to what extent do or can these cultural
differences survive in the contemporary world? Changes in the last 200 years in
commerce, travel, and communication have brought the need for worldwide
agreement on time-reckoning, including the idea of the so-called common era.
This bit of political correctness is designed to cover over the fact that the
common standard is in fact the Christian era of the West. This fact was largely
forgotten in the West, except perhaps in Rome, in the celebrations of the “millen-
nial” year 2000, and my impression is that many non-Westerners around the
world forgot it, too. China, of course, was officially governed in the 20th century
by the Marxist idea of history, that most Western and most 19th century of con-
ceptions. And no discussion of time and culture should overlook the Cultural
Revolution in China, which was in part an attempt to completely deny the signifi-
cance of the past. This attitude is in sharp contrast to contemporary China,
where the antiquity of Chinese culture and language is apparently a matter of
great public significance, leading to heated debates about the archeological evi-
dence for the Yellow Emperor and the earliest, but largely undocumented, dy-
nasties of Chinese history.
These questions, of course, take us beyond the scope of this study, and indeed
of phenomenology itself. But they do raise certain questions for phenomenol-
ogy, I think. Phenomenology is sometimes accused of a kind of willful primitiv-
ism or nativism, its emphasis on the “lived,” as opposed to the “objective,” being
taken as part of the romantic reaction to modernity. Are the differences of cul-
tural space and cultural time destined to disappear, so that calling them to mind
is really a way of celebrating the past, a form of nostalgia? Indeed there is a cer-
tain irony in philosophers celebrating such notions as place, home, and local
time even as they jet around the world, crossing time zones, and in some cases
not even having a very clear idea of where they are at home or what day it is. We
can answer that these aspects of phenomenology became possible only after the
ideas of objective space and time collapsed from within, with no help from phe-
nomenology. After all, we could say that the first to question objective space was
not Husserl but Riemann, and the first to question objective time was Einstein,
all within the realm of physical science. But in the process they moved space and
time even farther from our ordinary experience than they had previously been.
In so doing they opened up the possibility for philosophers to reclaim space and
time as elements of our experience. The globalization of space and time in the
contemporary world is not so much the triumph of the objective as it is the rise
of a new culture of space and time, still living uneasily with the old.
2. Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical

Points of View
“. . . zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.” —Leopold von Ranke
“Reference makes realists of us all.” —Arthur Danto
Professional and amateur classicists who open the Barrington Atlas of the Greek
and Roman World will be astounded and delighted by this triumph of scientific
geography and cartography. Covering every part of the globe that was touched
by the Greeks or Romans, from about 1000 BCE to about 640 CE, its 102 maps
reveal in differing scales the towns and cities, roads, natural resources and mines,
trade routes, and agricultural features of territories from northern Europe to the
Sahara, and from Gibraltar through India to the borders of China. It draws on
sources from the latest archeological methods and scientific dating procedures,
to the results of the most sensitive aerial surveys and infrared photography, in-
cluding charts based on satellite technology borrowed from the U.S. and British
defense establishments. Not only the content of the Atlas reflects the latest
t echnology: The digitally produced maps themselves are wonders of color pro-
duction and clarity of presentation, and there is a companion CD containing
commentaries on each of the maps and a guide to existing scholarship on the
areas involved.
Thus the Barrington Atlas gives us a portrait as accurate as we can get of this
part of the globe as it really was during the centuries of ancient Greek and
Roman civilization. Our knowledge of the political and military events of an-
cient history, and of the cultural, artistic, and literary achievements of antiquity,
can only be tremendously enriched by our ability to locate them, as accurately
as possible, in the geographical and physical context in which they really oc-
curred. Historians who want to give an account of the events of the past need all
the information they can get about the world in which these events took place.
But what if the events in question are actions? Does such an atlas then give us
their true setting? In the ancient world, actions which interest historians may be
those of well-known statesmen, warriors, philosophers, or poets, about which
much was written or said, both by the agents themselves and by others; or they
may be those of the anonymous sailors and traders, for example, who plied the
trade routes making decisions about where to land and unload their goods.
Attempting to understand such actions, either of individuals or of groups, histo-
rians will draw on whatever sources are available concerning the thoughts and
motives behind the action, supplementing this information with commonsense
views of human nature, or perhaps as well with more or less sophisticated
psychological theories. The goal of the historian is to come up with a satisfying
account of the actions, whether we call it explanation, understanding, or just
description, which somehow tells us more than we knew before.
But the first and most obvious feature of past actions, it might seem, as of any
other past events, is their location in space and time. Whatever else it may be,
history is concerned with events that can be given a date and a place. Sometimes
indeed questions arise about where and when a battle took place, for example,
and factual questions must be answered. More often this feature may appear
completely uncontroversial, stipulated in advance, while the genuine interest
lies elsewhere, e.g., in those far more perplexing questions about reasons and
motives.
In this study I want to show that this most obvious and taken-for-granted
feature of past actions, their location in space and time, is in some ways the most
interesting and problematic of features. By exploring some of our deepest-lying
assumptions about space and time, as they relate to the human actions of the
past, I want to discuss the interplay of points of view, between historian and
historical agent, in historical knowledge.
Most of what I say will be addressed not to historians, who I think will be fa-
miliar with the interplay I describe, but to philosophers of history, who have not
appreciated its subtleties. In a sense I am assuming a naïve, philosophically unre-

flective attitude toward the reality of the past, and trying to reveal some of the
paradoxes that attitude entails. This assumption may be itself naïve, but it is
useful, I think, perhaps only as a theoretical fiction, since I want to show that the
paradoxes of past place and time are continuous with those confronting us in the
everyday life of the present.
a. Place
When we consider a past action and its spatial location, we mean, of course, its
real location. In contrast to mythical and fictional events, this means among
other things that we can relate this location to our own and work out how we
might get from here to there, whether or not we actually make the trip. It means,
in other words, that we can find this location on the map of the world, and if we
were interested in events of the ancient world, we could turn to the pages of the
Barrington Atlas. There, presumably, we would find the true setting of the action,
in relation to the towns and other landmarks of the time.
But the ancients had their own maps of the world, produced as early as the
sixth century BCE, perhaps by Anaximander of Miletus. Influenced, of course,
by the travels and conquests that occurred throughout the period, the ancient
practice of cartography, like our own, served various purposes, from the practical
to the purely theoretical. It produced schematic drawings, like subway maps, for
getting from one place to another, as well as overall pictures of the known world
correlated with the astronomy of the heavens. It led eventually to the impressive
Hellenistic map of Eratosthenes and culminated in the Ptolemaic representa-
tions of the world, in the second century CE, which would influence Europe
through the Middle Ages. In all its variety, ancient cartography seems to have had
certain unifying features, unaffected even by differences of opinion over whether
the earth was a flat disk or a sphere. Among these are the encircling sea or river of
Oceanus, surrounding the inhabited world and framing it as a more or less circu-
lar island enclosing, in its turn, the Sea. Around this center were arrayed the con-
tinents, usually in some more or less symmetrical arrangement.
When we consider an action performed by an agent in the ancient world, say
one of Alexander’s campaigns, we inevitably and naturally locate that event at a
certain place on the globe. Explicitly or implicitly, we place it in relation to our
location, for example in North America. But we may be inclined to forget that
the act was not so located by the agent. Whether or not the agent in fact used
maps at all, his action was located in a world much more like that represented by
the maps of the agent’s time. We know that when we locate any real event we do
so by reference to the larger spatial and geographical setting in which it occurs.
And we can be sure that an agent in the ancient world did the same. But in this
case the geographical settings are vastly different. If asked: But which is the real
setting? we would not hesitate. Whatever the agent may have thought, he was,
after all, acting in the real world.
This response reduces the agent’s world to a thought, an idea or collection of
ideas, and mostly false ones at that. In fact these ideas usually interest us only
when their falseness is an issue, as in the case of Columbus’ misrepresentations
of where he was going on his voyage of 1492. We reduce the agent’s world to
something, in other words, “in the agent’s head.” To put it more broadly, the
agent’s world is reduced to a worldview. In the case of space and physical sur-
roundings, the thoughts and ideas in question are usually described as pictures
or representations. Thus in a sense the agent’s maps, even though they too existed
in space, are transformed into mental phenomena and take up residence in the
agent’s head. But what they represented, at least as they represented it, did not
exist. So in a sense their pictures refer to nothing real. The agent’s head itself, of
course, along with the rest of his body, was itself located out there in the real
spatial world where the action really occurred. Though we have our own maps,
and may even think of ourselves as having mental pictures or representations,
the real locations, and the events that occurred in them, are distinct and indepen-
dent of these representations. That is one of the things we mean, after all, by
calling them “real.” Reality is precisely that which is not merely mental, not rela-
tive to somebody’s conception or idea. When it comes to our own activity, in this
case our activity as historians of locating and describing certain events in the
past, this activity only makes sense as referring to something real in space. As his-
torians we are not, after all talking about something in our heads.
But then neither was our ancient historical agent. It was in a real spatial world,
whose features and contours existed for him independently of his thoughts and
his “head,” that he made his plans and set out to realize them. If we now turn our
attention to the question, not of the reality of the spatial surroundings, but to the
reality of the agents themselves, and of their actions, we clearly distort this if we
portray them as wrapped up in the contents of their own heads. As persons they
exist and act in spatial surroundings that are as real to them as ours (including
their real location for us) are to us. And for the historical agent, as for us, these
actual surroundings form part of a larger spatial background that extends
beyond, behind, and around the actual surroundings, a space beyond the scope
of the senses, which is what we try to represent when we have recourse to maps.
In our effort to understand and describe historical action, we are led to the his-
torical agent behind the action. If we are to take this agent seriously and under-
stand him as he really is, we must take him as existing and acting in a real, not a
mental, world.
What this means is that the very effort to reach the reality of the past, i.e., to
describe the past as it really was, requires us, at least in the case of some historical
agents, to confront another reality, one which may diverge in some respects from
our own. But part of the commonsense notion of reality is that there can be only
one, not two. The very idea of a divergent reality, or of multiple realities, is para-
doxical. The agent’s reality must be “de-realized” or put into quotation marks. To
put this into phenomenological language, behind the agent’s intentions lies his
intentionality, his consciousness of being in the world. But the historian’s view
of him reduces this world to a merely intended world.
b. The Reality of Others

In stating this I am not pretending to reveal anything startling or new. The para-
dox I describe is in fact something we deal with quite readily, both in historical
inquiry and in other areas. What is remarkable, in fact, is that something so para-
doxical as multiple realities should be such a common feature of our discourse
and knowledge.
It could be argued that the situation described, of a kind of ontological para-
dox at the heart of the interaction between historian and historical agent, is just
a special variant of the situation that exists between persons generally. The
person I encounter in everyday life is a real entity in the world. But as a person,
unlike a stone or a piece of furniture, she also has her own world and her own
reality, something that is often brought home to me when we find ourselves in
disagreement. Though we share the same physical surroundings and refer to the
same objects, the other person may endow them with descriptions and meanings
foreign to my own. This may be most obvious in an encounter between persons
of differing religious beliefs, where objects, buildings, and other spaces may have
a significance for one person that is completely missing for the other. Further-
more, these immediate surroundings fit into a larger environment beyond the
reach of our senses that may differ drastically from one person to the other—
e.g., trivially, in those arguments about directions that may be settled by consult-
ing the map—or asking directions. Less trivially, again in the case of religious
beliefs, the world of the other person, in the broadest sense of the cosmos as a
whole in which the individual has her place and acts, may differ radically from
my own.
The example of religious belief is instructive in this context, since religious
belief is, for the person who has it, a commitment to a certain kind of reality—
indeed, on some accounts, the ultimate commitment to the ultimate reality.
Moreover, it is more than just a belief in the existence of a particular entity like
God; it is a belief which attaches important values and meanings to the world as
a whole, including, as we have noted, parts of the everyday surroundings. In spite
of this, persons of differing religious beliefs, including those who have none, are
capable, at least in some cases, of interacting and communicating meaningfully
within what is, for all practical purposes, a common world. Yet the expression
“common world” may say too much: At most common surroundings and refer-
ents function for different individuals as parts of very different wholes.
Our ordinary means of dealing with this situation may be similar to what we
described before: When persons do not share such beliefs, one of them may
reduce the real world, in which the other so firmly believes, to the contents of
her mind. But we badly misrepresent the reality of the other person if we think
of her as acting and speaking with reference to things in her mind. Here again,
taking the other seriously requires taking seriously the real world of the other
even when its reality, paradoxically, conflicts with our own. So again, at the heart
of everyday communication, a paradox arises: The more we seek to take seri-
ously and understand the reality of another person, the more we need an under-
standing of the “unreal” reality which is, for that person, the real world.
If this tells us something about what constitutes, in the broadest sense, the
otherness of the other, it has to be admitted that some others are more other
than others. In the case of inhabitants of a distant culture, like the ancient Greeks
and Romans, the nature of the real world which existed for them, and framed
their actions, is harder for us to understand because it is so distant, and differs so
much, from our own. The unthinking ease with which we locate them and their
actions on our globe and our maps is a good indicator of this. Of course, in the
case of our contemporaries we can communicate because our realities, while di-
verging, nevertheless overlap; and it is the same, in a sense, with the ancients: We
assume that their bodies, their desires, their character and emotions were
enough like ours that we can understand a lot about them. And when Alexander
contemplated the shores of Egypt or the mountains of Asia Minor, he must have
seen more or less what we see, or could see, there today. Nevertheless, these as-
pects of the ancients’ lives and their surroundings were not isolated features but
were part of a larger whole which made up their world. The seemingly unavoid-
able illusion, which attends our attempts to understand others, is to think that
because the parts overlap they belong to the same whole.
c. Time
When we spoke of the inhabitants of the ancient world as belonging to a “dis-
tant” culture, we were of course indulging in the common metaphorical substitu-
tion of space for time. For the anthropologist, otherness is sometimes a function
of distance in the literal sense, but the historian’s distance is temporal. If this
distance can require us to introduce the difference between real space and “real”
space, so the same distinction must be made regarding time itself. Just as the
historical agent lived in a real spatial world that was different from that of the
historian, so he lived in a temporal world which was different as well.
But how can there be a different temporal world? If the action really hap-
pened, then it happened in real time. The idea of any other time, such as “once
upon a time,” would mean precisely that it didn’t happen at all. It must have a
date, even if the date has a different name, and that places it in a certain relation
to all the other real events that really happened. The historian’s commitment to
describe what really happened commits her to real time no less than to real
space. Just as the place of a historical event is in the same world as the historian,
at a certain real distance from the historian’s own, so the time of that event is at a
certain real temporal “distance” from the historian’s act of speaking, thinking, or
writing about it.
But an action, from the agent’s point of view, has its own temporal “setting,” in
which the present of the action stands in relation to its past and a future. The time
of an action can no more be without such a setting than its place can be without
surroundings. Essential to an action in particular is the purpose it is meant to
achieve, and this usually lies in its future. The action, of course, may not achieve
its purpose, and its real consequences may be very different from those intended
by the agent. Here we are in familiar territory, of course, with the distinction
between intended and real consequences. But here we encounter in time the
same difference we found with regard to space, namely between the real and the
“real.” Seeking to “locate” an action in the real world, with respect to time, the
historian inevitably situates it in relation to the events that really followed. For
the agent, however, the act was not so situated, and the genuine understanding of
the action seems to require taking seriously the agent’s point of view. But this
means that the very attempt to represent the reality of an action requires that it
be located in a time whose future reality was very different from what really
happened.
It may be argued that it is a conceptual mistake to speak of “the act’s future” or
“the agent’s future” as if it were real, or even “real,” even from the agent’s point of
view. The future, when I perform an action now, is not real—it hasn’t even hap-
pened yet. At best it is merely potentially or possibly real. Only what is happen-
ing or has happened can be real; so the intended but unrealized consequences of
an action seem to have no claim on reality at all, even of the weakest sort. And this
is even truer of past than of present actions, since their real consequences have
definitively crowded their intended consequences off the ontological stage. In
fact, these latter seem to have lost even their claim to be potentially real.
This objection takes us onto the rocky terrain of the logic and ontology of
tenses, which has been a philosopher’s battlefield since Aristotle. But without
going there, we can see that for our purposes there is something wrong with it.
For one thing, it gives us no way of recognizing, among all the things in the past
that didn’t happen, those which played a role in the agent’s framing and execution
of the action. It is the agent’s point of view, in fact, which this objection ignores.
The reality, at least in the sense of the realization or realizability of the goal of
action, and through it the elimination or avoidance of other possibilities, is
something without which the action would not be what it is. In that sense it be-
longs to the reality of the action. So we can still affirm as a basic paradox of the
historian’s understanding that the real action can’t be understood without refer-
ence to a particular reality which didn’t happen. On the other hand, and this is
the kernel of truth in the objection, there is a difference, precisely from the
agent’s point of view, between the existing space which forms the present setting
of his action (the coast of China for Columbus) and the future goal to be real-
ized (landing there) through his action. Both are, in the language of intentional-
ity used before, intended realities, but they are intended in two very different
senses. Such are the subtleties of the parallel we are trying to draw between space
and time with regard to the real/unreal distinction.
The temporal setting of an action includes much more than its intended con-
sequences. Particular future events are part of a larger temporal whole which is
as much a part of the agent’s world as are its spatial features. Just as the agent lo-
cates his action and his life within the wider geographical world and ultimately
within the cosmos, so he faces a larger future which may have quite distinctive
features which differ significantly from the historian’s real time. Depending on
the context, especially the religious context, this future may involve both the in-
dividual’s destiny and that of his people and of the human race as a whole, which
are usually closely bound up with each other. Again, it is inevitable that however
seriously the historian takes this intended future, its reality for the agent, its ex-
istence as an integral part of the world, is demoted to the status of a worldview, a
feature not of the world at all but only of the agent’s mind.
The temporal setting of an action is not limited to its future. The agent’s view
of where his action comes from, of what led up to it and caused or motivated it,
may differ as radically from the historian’s conception of what really happened
as the action’s real future may differ from its intended consequences. Thus we
can speak, in the broader sense of intentionality, of an intended past as well as
an intended future. Indeed we must speak this way: Just as the action’s real oc-
currence requires that something really led up to it and something really fol-
lowed it, so its status as an action with an agent requires that it have both an
intended past and an intended future. And the past of the action, for the agent,
like its future, is not limited to its immediate antecedents. The agent as an indi-
vidual, and as a member of a smaller or larger group, has an origin and a history,
which belong to the agent’s self-conception and ultimately play an essential role
in the formulation and execution of the action. Indeed, the action itself may
have a temporal past which is inseparable from its sense, especially if it is, for
example, an act of revenge—personal, family, or community—or an act of
ritual commemoration.
What emerges from all this is a very complex conception of the historical
agent whom the historian faces and tries to understand. What makes this com-
plexity acute is that it is an ontological complexity, a conflict of realities. As a
human being the agent is (or was), of course, in the real world, otherwise pre-
sumably the historian would not be interested in him. And this means he is in
real space and real time. But the agent also has a world, a setting in the broadest
sense, which includes both spatial and temporal features, in the latter case involv-
ing past and future. This world may and probably does differ considerably, in
many of its features, from the reality of the historian, yet it is essential that it be
taken into account if the agent and his action are to be understood.
d. “Virtual History”
These considerations are closely related to those put forward by the British his-
torian Niall Ferguson in arguing for counterfactual history. Introducing a
volume devoted to a series of “what if?” essays about various historical events,
from the English Civil War (without Cromwell) to the end of the Cold War
(without Gorbachev), Ferguson (1999) mounts a serious defense of an ap-
proach dismissed as fantasy literature by most historians and regarded as the
very antithesis of what history is about. Ferguson’s main target is the determin-
istic view of history, which he sees as coming into full force in the 19th century,
and as still accepted by many historians well into the 20th. This is the view that
what did happen had to happen, a view which in effect denies the freedom of
historical agents and reduces them to pawns in a process completely outside
their control. Thus agents’ views of their own actions, and of themselves as
agents, are rendered false and even meaningless by a theory Ferguson regards as
dubious at best.
But he also sees that there is more to this problem than a theoretical commit-
ment. Though he quips that “there was nothing inevitable about the triumph of
historical determinism” (p. 20), he admits that there is a kind of “uncertainty
principle” which attaches to the historian’s point of view: “any observation of
historical evidence inevitably distorts its significance by the very fact of its selec-
tion through the prism of hindsight” (p. 74). That is, when a historian looks at an
action, she is interested only in what has significance for what (really) came af-
terward, and what might have been is forgotten altogether.
But this distortion is not so inevitable that it cannot be overcome, and this
is what Ferguson urges historians to do. Invoking—and this is truly inevitable
in any such discussion—Ranke’s pledge to present the past “wie es eigentlich
gewesen,” Ferguson interprets this to mean that “any serious reflection as to how
it might have been” is ruled out (p. 43). But attention to what “might be” is the
essence of the agent’s point of view in history. To act is to envisage certain
outcomes, whether or not those outcomes actually followed. “The historian

who allows his knowledge as to which of these outcomes subsequently hap-
pened to obliterate the other outcomes people regarded as plausible cannot
hope to recapture the past ‘as it actually was’ . . . To understand how it actually
was, we . . . need to understand how it actually wasn’t—but how, to contempo-
raries, it might have been” (p. 87).
Ferguson presents a strong brief for the role of contingency and freedom in
history, and such a view, if taken seriously, can have important theoretical and
even practical consequences. At best it has the potential to make us aware of the
utter contingency of the present—the world need not be as it is—and perhaps
to convince us of the importance of our own choices. This may be the point
Ferguson seeks to drive home by concluding his volume with an afterword called
“Virtual History, 1646–1996.” It ties together the various periods and events dis-
cussed by the other authors in his collection, and concludes with the humiliating
defeat of Britain in the Falkland Islands and the subsequent “collapse of the
West (1989-90),” including Britain’s entire colonial empire in North America, as
viewed from the perspective of the triumphant Romanov dynasty in Russia. But
it is hard not to read this as whimsical and funny—even its author seems to view
it that way—and this is itself a comment on how convincing Ferguson’s view
can be. It suggests that he is struggling not merely against a mistaken philosophi-
cal view but against something deeper, something that belongs structurally to
the historian’s retrospective point of view.
This is the point I have been trying to make, a point which Ferguson seems to
glimpse, as we have seen, when he speaks of a historian’s “uncertainty principle.”
In fact, in a way the problem lies deeper even than the historian’s point of view.
What I have been calling the paradoxical character of our view of past actions is
not restricted to historians but belongs to the very experience of space, time,
and reality. When something happens, it joins a very prestigious and utterly ex-
clusive club, one from which all might-have-beens are rigorously banished. Like a
member of any such club, it consorts only with its fellow members. Just as a real
place is spatially related only to all the other real places—there is no map show-
ing the route from Atlanta to Narnia—so a real event is linked, in real time, to all
the other things that really happened. And the idea that the link between real
events is as real as the events themselves finds its expression in the notion of his-
torical determinism.
Ferguson knows that historical determinism is much older than the 19th cen-
tury, but he still treats it in all its forms as a rather dubious minority theory. What
he fails to appreciate is that historical agents themselves, and not just philoso-
phers and theologians theorizing about them, often viewed their own actions as
part of an over-arching plan over which they had little or no control. In fact, the
idea that individual and collective choices really count, and that human beings
can actually shape or even create the future rather merely expecting and proph-
esying it, is, as R. Kosellek (1979) has shown, an idea of fairly recent origin.
Indeed, we could say that it is an Enlightenment idea so radical that the 19th
century retreated from it and reintegrated human action into a superhuman plan.
Ferguson calls divine agency “a kind of explanation of last resort” (p. 21), echo-
ing Herbert Butterfield’s views in The Origins of History (1081, pp. 200–201),
portraying our remote ancestors as rationalists puzzling over why they couldn’t
predict the rains and then coming up with this promising hypothesis to explain
them. What he doesn’t consider is that there is something very natural and
human about deterministic theories of various sorts, especially the religious
ones, and free will may prove the harder position to argue for. Of course it is
true, as many philosophers have argued, that it is impossible to act and choose
from alternatives and at the same time think one’s action determined. Human
agency itself, the argument goes, is inconsistent with determinism. But inconsis-
tency, hobgoblin of little minds, has seldom been an efficacious argument against
deeply held beliefs, especially religious ones.
Even if historical agents were themselves historical determinists, however,
they still had their view of the future, which will most likely be at variance with
what actually happened. In fact it is the determinist who has the clearest view of
how his action fits into the long-term pattern—culminating in the last judg-
ment, say, or the triumph of the proletariat. Thus Ferguson is still right about the
importance of the envisaged but non-real future for understanding action, but
he has a too limited conception of its scope. It is not just the intended conse-
quences of an action, its plausible “outcomes,” that make it comprehensible; it is
the whole sweep of its future horizon, from the agent’s point of view, the long-
term destiny of the individual or the group, which forms the ultimate frame for
the action. It is this broad sweep of unreality that the historian must struggle to
keep in the picture, in spite of the tendency, which in my view belongs structur-
ally to the historian’s perspective, to ignore it.
e. Narrative
It is notable that Ferguson takes aim not only at historical determinism but also
at narrative history. “To write history according to the conventions of a novel or
play is . . . to impose a new kind of determinism on the past: the teleology of the
traditional narrative form” (p. 67). This involves “the assumption that the pres-
ent was always the end-point (and implicitly the only possible end-point) of the
historian’s chosen narrative” (p. 67). Here Ferguson is at best only half right. On
the one hand it is true that a narrative typically selects and organizes the actions
and other events which make up the story in relation to an outcome. This is the
very “prism of hindsight” which according to Ferguson “inevitably distorts” the
past. According to Danto, “in order that stories be told, things and events must
be perceived and described only as they can be described historically, which is to
say: from the perspective that events which are future to them but past to the
historians, afford” (Danto 1985, p. 350).
But stories, whether fictional or historical, focus their attention on persons
rather than anonymous forces, and human actions are crucially important. Typi-
cally, the uncertainty of outcomes and the drama of deliberation and choice for
the agent are central to a narrative portrayal. Part of what Ferguson objects to in
historical determinism is the view that certain outcomes would occur, no matter
what people did. In a narrative, by contrast, the outcome really depends on what
people do. Furthermore, an endpoint is not necessarily the only possible end-
point, and a strong sense for the contingency of what actually happens is built
into the story. This is in many cases part of its drama. So Danto’s statement is
surely too strong. It may be that events in a story are selected because of their
role in determining what comes later, but they need not be “perceived and de-
scribed” only from the perspective of those later events. In fact, if they are ac-
tions they must not be if the agent is to be understood and the ironic discrep-
ancy between intended and real consequences is to be fully appreciated.
If we think of narrative in this sense we could come up with an interpreta-
tion of Ranke’s celebrated words which differs markedly from Ferguson’s
rather conventional reading. If Ranke had wanted to “penetrate to the real,
objective kernel of the historical past,” removing “all subjective distortions,
errors and omissions by the tradition,” as one interpretation has it ( Jaeger
1992, pp. 82f.), he might have said that the aim of his study was “sagen, was
wirklich geschehen ist”—to say what really happened. But what he objects to in
the tradition is not that his predecessors have made factual mistakes, which he
is going to set right, but that they have treated the past as a source of moral
lessons. To describe what he wants to do, by contrast to this, Ranke chooses
zeigen instead of sagen, wie instead of was, eigentlich instead of wirklich, and
gewesen instead of geschehen. The best English translation of these words might
be: to show how it really was, or: to show what it was really like. This brings us
close to the notion of the subjective quality of experience which Thomas
Nagel (1979) tries to capture when he speaks of “what it is like to be a bat.”
This may not stand up well as an interpretation of the historical Ranke, but it
can put us on the track of the role of narrative in dealing with historical agency.
If what happened is an action, it comes with an agent and the agent in turn
comes with an agent’s point of view. To tell the story of the action is to include
that point of view.
But what it is like to be a human agent (whatever it may be like to be a bat) is
not some ineffable qualium. The term “point of view” might be described as an
intentional expression. Just as (for the phenomenologist) all consciousness is
consciousness of something, so a point of view is a point of view on something, a

point from which something is viewed. At the limit, this “something” is the
world. To be a human subject or agent is to be situated in a real spatial and tem-
poral world—that is, a world of spatial surroundings which has a future and a
past. To act is to bring past motives and means together in service of realizing a
goal. Thus for the agent the present action gets its meaning from the place in
which it is located, the past it comes from, and the future it is meant to realize.
With respect to the future, one way of describing this is to say that the present
action is being perceived and described by the agent from the perspective that
events future to it afford. This, of course, is Danto’s description of telling a story,
and it suggests that the agent, in performing an action, is engaged in a kind of
proto-narrative activity of his own.
On this view the narrative form, far from distorting human action, as Fergu-
son and other theorists argue, is entirely appropriate to it because action itself
has a narrative quality. The agent’s action can be seen as the acting out of a story
with a beginning (the antecedent situation and motive), a middle (the present
means employed), and an end (the goal to be attained.) The story need not be
explicitly told by the agent as it is being acted out (though it often is), but its
implicit temporal structure is what organizes the action and gives it its meaning.
If we think of the agent as conceiving, originating, or initiating the action ac-
cording to his own plan, the agent might seem to stand in relation to the action as
author to story. But one need not be the author of a story to tell it or act it out.
Like an actor on the stage, one can play a part conceived by another. Thus the
proto-narrative conception of action is not necessarily tied to the idea of the free
will of the agent, even from the agent’s point of view. Agents may see themselves
as carrying out a plan not of their own devising, or even as being part of a plan of
whose larger contours and ultimate purpose they are not aware.
On this proto-narrative theory of action, the historian’s later account acquires
the status of a story within a story, or a story about a story. This gives us another
way of thinking about the interplay of points of view between historian and
historical agent, between real and intended consequences, between the reality of
the historian and that of the agent. The agent acts in the middle of a story whose
end is yet to come, but the historian knows how the story really ended. The
historian’s aim is to tell the true story, the real story, not some other story that
never came true. Yet there is no way that she can leave out that other story, the
agent’s story, together with its whole past and future, its beginning, middle, and
end, from the agent’s point of view. This story’s end may not be real; even its
beginning and middle, in the sense of its antecedents and present circumstances,
as envisaged by the agent, may be found by the historian to be at variance with
the real. But the story itself is real; indeed, it is as real as the agent himself, be-
cause it is what the agent really believed.
f. Conclusion
The aim of these considerations is not to issue a plea to historians, in the manner
of Ferguson, to take more seriously the agent’s point of view, and certainly not
to argue for the importance of counterfactual histories. As noted, the points I am
making are not news to most historians. Those who deal with historical agents
know that these agents have their own conception of the future, their own point
of view, and ultimately their own world, that may differ radically from the histo-
rian’s own. I suggested earlier that the situation in which a historian confronts a
historical agent is just a special version of the ordinary situation in which we
confront another person. Some of us are better than others at taking the other
person’s point of view into account, of putting ourselves in the other’s place, and
this is no doubt as true of historians as it is of the rest of us. There are normative,
indeed ethical issues here: We should take the other’s point of view seriously.
What is more, I believe this obligation extends even to those who are long dead
and gone. This points in the direction of a more serious consideration of the rela-
tion between history and ethics, but it is not my purpose to enter into it here.
My remarks are addressed more to philosophers of history than to historians,
especially those who emphasize, like Danto, the retrospective point of view.
Danto struck an important blow against empiricism, which would devalue his-
torical knowledge because it cannot have first-hand experience of its objects, by
showing that the historian, thanks to retrospection, has an access to past events
that eyewitnesses could not have had. But he downplayed the role of the view
eyewitnesses did have, especially agents’ views of their own action. Thus I am
criticizing not historians’ narratives but philosophers’ interpretations of them.
The same holds for historical determinism, which is a philosophical, not a his-
torical, position, even though some historians may hold it and even though it
may infect their practice. As noted, attention to the role of agents in choosing
among alternatives in the past can give us a stronger sense of the contingency and
even fragility of things-as-they-are, freeing us to some extent of the dead weight
of the historically real. But again this is not a point that needs to be directed at
historians in particular.
It might be thought that I have been presenting a covert argument for histori-
cal relativism. I began with the naïve-realist idea of describing the past as it really
was, and argued that in the case of actions and agents this requires attention to
the agent’s point of view. But this point of view opens out onto another reality,
the alternative space and time, past and future, of the agent’s world. For the agent
this was not something in his head, not a worldview, but precisely a world—a
real world. When we contrast this world with the real world of the historian, of
course, we can see its dependence on the agent’s point of view. But is the histo-
rian’s reality not likewise dependent on the historian’s own point of view? The
“real” globe represented in the Barrington Atlas, the “real” outcomes of past ac-
tions, are after all just our idea of what is or was real. Who’s to say how our “real”
world and “real” past will fare in the eyes of future historians? Our only consola-
tion, perhaps, it that their view in turn will be just that: yet another view.
Again this is familiar terrain, one which I have no intention of entering. The
best argument against relativism, that it is impossible to hold a view (relativism
itself) and at the same time take it to be relative, works no better than other re-
proaches of inconsistency (the hobgoblin again) as a way of settling this high-
level philosophical dispute. But this point is relevant to my much more modest
project, which can be described as a phenomenology of the interplay of points
of view. The historian cannot possibly take his point of view to be nothing but
a point of view, any more than the historical agent can do so, at least at the deep
ontological level I am trying to describe. That is, a historian can be tentative and
cautious in putting forward particular views, but this admirable modesty has its
place within the larger context of the historian’s belief in a real past in which
events and actions really happened. This is not a particular belief that can be cor-
rected but is a structural element of our relation to the world and our use of
language to describe it. This is what Danto (1985, p. 315) means by saying that
reference makes realists of us all: Philosophers who argue about realism or ideal-
ism want to shore up or undermine this original, so-called naïve realism, but they
can never succeed in removing it from our attitude toward the world.
Thus we cannot help locating Alexander’s campaigns in the real Middle East,
availing ourselves of the Barrington Atlas and situating them in their proper
places on the real globe, just as we cannot help locating Columbus’ landings
along the coast of the Bahamas rather than the coast of China. Nor should we do
so, any more than we should ignore the modern epidemiological account of the
spread of the Black Death. We want, after all, to know what really happened,
whatever those agents and patients may have thought. But their thinking hap-
pened too, and along with it the content of their thought, the objects of their
beliefs, the world in which they existed. We know this too, not just theoretically,
as we have seen, but as an extension of our ordinary way of dealing with other
people.
I have tried to show that this knowledge introduces a kind of structural con-
flict of realities into the historian’s point of view, at least insofar as a historian
deals with an agent’s point of view. We could even speak of a struggle, consider-
ing how hard it is to accommodate these points of view and take them seriously.
The weight of our sense and knowledge of what really happened makes difficult
our attempt to penetrate to the alternate reality of the agent. Thus as we read the
diaries of Viktor Klemperer, a Jew living in Dresden during the Nazi years,
whose hopes and fears for his own survival are linked to the changing develop-
ments of the war raging around him, it is a struggle to block out what we know
of how it all ended and how it affected Klemperer’s own fate. But we feel we must
do so in order to understand him and many others like him.
It could be argued that this is true, if our goal is to understand historical
agents as persons, perhaps a perfectly laudable enterprise; but the point of his-
tory is not to understand persons but to understand what really happened. But
this assumes a much too clear, and too restricted, view of what “the point of
history” is, a view that I, for one, cannot so readily accept.
VIII
Experience, Narrative, and Historical

Knowledge
Narrative came up in the previous chapter, as it has from time to time in earlier
chapters. It is inevitable that it should, even though it has not been the central
focus of our present work, because of its important role in historical thinking,
writing, and experience. In this final chapter we examine narrative from three
different perspectives that are not covered by what we said about narrative in
previous chapters of this book. They also consider narrative in ways that go
beyond the treatment of narrative in my earlier work, Time, Narrative and His-
tory. Nothing in this chapter contradicts the basic theory of narrative in that
work or what is said about narrative in the present book. But the three studies
presented here add new dimensions to both of those discussions by placing the
discussion of narrative in contexts that have not been present in previous
discussions.
The first study examines the contrast between history and fiction and argues
against several versions of this contrast that have been used in discussions of
history. The second study looks at narrative as a form of explanation and con-
trasts it with other forms of explanation. It also examines the reasons behind the
choice of alternative explanatory frameworks. The focus of the third study is the
distinction between epistemology and ontology and how the concept of narra-
tive may map onto that distinction. This study, which takes its point of departure
from Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et récit, also considers the connection between narra-
tive and hermeneutics, in view of the fact that this latter concept can be seen as
both epistemological and ontological.
Another way in which the studies in this chapter differ from those in previous
chapters is that their focus is largely on historical knowledge rather than histori-
cal experience. The point of departure in the early chapters of this book was the
need to deflect attention away from a preoccupation with knowledge and back to
the experience which underlies it. But that experience, once clarified, needs to be
reconnected with historical knowledge, because it can present the latter in a new
199
light. To some extent we have tried to do this at certain junctures along the way,
but the present chapter contributes further to this effort.
1. History, Fiction, and Human Time

Most people think that the historian has a responsibility to tell the truth about
the past. This is one of the things that distinguish the writer of history from the
writer of fiction, who is free of this responsibility. But what if we could not in
principle separate history from fiction? The historian’s responsibility to tell the
truth about the past could then in principle not be fulfilled.
How does it stand with the distinction between history and fiction? As liter-
ary genres, these are conventionally considered mutually exclusive: History re-
lates events that really happened in the past, fiction portrays imaginary events—
that is, things that never happened at all. But this distinction has been challenged
by some literary theorists and philosophers of history. What reasons could
there be for this challenge?
We can see why the distinction might begin to blur if we look first at works
considered fictional. Recently some novelists (E. L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo
are good examples) have crossed conventional genres by attributing fictional ac-
tivities to real historical characters. But even in quite traditional fiction the imagi-
nary events of novels (and plays and films) are often set in real places and against
the background of real historical events. Thus many works classified as fiction
contain elements of history. This is an uncontroversial observation with which
few, including the novelists themselves, would disagree.
But it is much more controversial to claim, on the other side, that history un-
avoidably contains elements of fiction. With this most historians would proba-
bly not agree. Is this a justifiable claim? This is the question I want to take up in
what follows. If true this assertion might lead to the conclusion that the distinc-
tion between history and fiction could not be maintained, and that the histori-
an’s responsibility to tell the truth about the past could not be met. I think this
would be a mistake. After examining this claim about history and fiction and
placing it in its proper context, I want to show that while it is understandable, it
rests on a number of confusions and is, in the end, untenable.
a. Questioning the Distinction between History and Fiction

The view I want to examine is usually associated with French poststructuralism
and is tied in with skeptical views about the capacity of language to refer beyond
itself to the real world. But the relevant claims about history and fiction are in
fact most fully expressed in recent work of Hayden White (who is not French)
E x per ience, Nar rative, and Histor i cal K nowl edg e 201
and Paul Ricoeur (who is not a poststructuralist). Its origins can be traced to
certain theorists of the 1960s and could be said to follow upon the discovery, or
rediscovery, that history is indeed a literary genre.
In an essay, “Historical Discourse,” Roland Barthes (1970), one of the fathers
of poststructuralism, evokes the conventional contrast between fictional and
historical narrative and asks: “is there in fact any specific difference between fac-
tual and imaginary narrative, any linguistic feature by which we may distinguish
on the one hand the mode appropriate to the relation of historical events . . . and
on the other hand the mode appropriate to the epic, novel or drama?” (p. 145).
He expresses his negative conclusion when he says that “by its structures alone,
without recourse to its content, historical discourse is essentially a product of
ideology, or rather of imagination” (p. 153).
Louis O. Mink (1987), an American theorist of the same period whose work
has influenced both Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, came to similar conclu-
sions: “Narrative form in history, as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of indi-
vidual imagination.” As such it “cannot defend its claim to truth by any accepted
procedure of argument or authentication” (p. 199). Hayden White (1987),
asking after “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” comes
to the conclusion that its value “arises out of a desire to have real events display
the coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of an image of life that can only be
imaginary” (p. 24).
Paul Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative (1983–85), though he does not try to
break down the distinction between history and fiction, speaks of their “inter-
section” (entrecroisement) in the sense that each “avails itself ” (se sert) of the
other. Under the heading of the “fictionalization of history,” he argues that his-
tory draws on fiction to “refigure” or “restructure” time by introducing narrative
contours into the non-narrative time of nature (vol. 3, p. 265). It is the act of
imagining (se figurer que . . .) which effects the “reinscription of lived time (time
with a present) into purely successive time (time without present)” (p. 268).
Narrative opens us to the “realm of the ‘as if ’” (vol. 1, p. 101) through the “medi-
ating role of the imaginary” (vol. 3, p. 269). This is the fictional element in
history.
Besides fiction itself, the two other key concepts in these passages are narrative
and imagination (or the imaginary). If we are to evaluate these views about the
relation between history and fiction, it will be necessary to examine these con-
cepts and their combination as they figure in the theories in question. It is clear
that they stem in some way from an awareness of what we may call, in the broad-
est sense, the “literary” aspects of historical discourse.
Before we can appreciate the significance of this, however, we must begin by
considering the background of these discussions in the philosophy of history.
These authors are reacting to a positivistic conception of history that grew up in
the 19th century and persisted, in spite of many attacks, well into the 20th. Prior
to the late Enlightenment period history was generally conceived as a literary
genre more valued for the moral and practical lessons it could derive from past
events than for its accuracy in portraying them. Only in the 19th century, first in
Germany, did it acquire the dignity and trappings of an academic discipline or
Wissenschaft, complete with critical methods for evaluating sources and justify-
ing its assertions. The great Leopold von Ranke was explicitly repudiating the
old topos of historia magistra vitae when he claimed that the task of history was
simply to render the past wie es eigentlich gewesen—as it really was.
From the time it was firmly established in the academy, history has striven to
maintain its respectability as a “scientific” discipline (at least in the German
sense of Wissenschaft) and played down the literary features of its discourse.
With the rise of the so-called social sciences in the 20th century (sociology, an-
thropology, economics, “political science”) many historians have coveted a
place among them, borrowing quantitative methods and applying them to the
past. Here the Annales school in France led the way, beginning in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, in philosophy, neo-positivism in the form of the “unity of science”
movement tried to incorporate history by showing that its mode of explanation
is—or rather could and therefore should be—assimilable to that of the natural
sciences.
But this attempt to make history into a science has never been very convinc-
ing. History has never in practice achieved the kind of “objectivity” and agree-
ment which non-scientists attribute to and envy in the natural sciences. Nor is
it completely assimilable to the social sciences, which themselves, in any case,
have never quite lived up to their own scientific pretensions. Three interrelated
features of historical discourse have been noted by those who disagree with the
attempt to integrate history with the sciences: First, history is concerned with
individual events and courses of events for their own sake, not in order to
derive general laws from them (it is “ideographic” rather than “nomothetic”);
second, to account for historical events is often to understand the subjective
thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the persons involved rather than to relate
external events to their external causes (“understanding” vs. “explanation”);
and third, to relate sequences of events in this way, with reference to the inten-
tions of the persons involved, is to place them in narrative form, i.e., to tell
stories about them.
For the positivists it is precisely these features which history should sup-
press or overcome if it is to become genuinely scientific. And to some degree
the Annales historians and their followers have tried to meet this demand: By
shifting their focus from persons and their actions to deep-structure eco-
nomic forces and long-term social changes, they produce a discourse which
seems far removed from traditional history. But narrative history has never
disappeared, and those who counter the positivist view claim that if social
and economic history can dispense with traditional story-telling they still
need to be complemented by narrative accounts of conscious agents. Against
the demand that history be assimilated to the social or even the natural sci-
ences, many have argued that the narrative discourse of history is a cognitive
form in its own right and a mode of explanation perfectly appropriate to our
understanding of the human past. Indeed, beginning with Dilthey and the
neo-Kantians at the end of the 19th century, a strong countercurrent to posi-
tivism has refused to accept natural science as the model for disciplines deal-
ing with human events and actions, including even the social sciences, and
has insisted on the autonomy and respectability in its own right of knowl-
edge based on an understanding of conscious human agents which presents
its results in narrative form.
How do Barthes, Mink, White, and Ricoeur fit into this picture? They arrive
on the scene when the narrative form in general, and its role in history in particu-
lar, are being intensively discussed. It is this feature of history which is the pri-
mary focus of their attention, and White and Ricoeur, at least, believe that his-
tory is always essentially narrative even when it tries to divest itself of its
story-telling features. At the same time they still think of history as asserting its
capacity to “represent” the past “as it really was,” i.e., as claiming “scientific”
status for its results. Their view is that this latter claim cannot be upheld in view
of the narrative character of historical discourse. Why?
The passages quoted above indicate that for these writers, narrative, as the act
of story-telling, is not appropriate to the rendering of real events. A story weaves
together human acts and experiences into a coherent whole with (as Aristotle
said) a beginning, a middle, and an end. Its criteria are aesthetic, not scientific. It
is an imaginative act of creation, not the representation of something already
given. Thus narrative is properly at home in fiction, which makes no pretense of
portraying the real world. When narrative is employed in a discipline which pur-
ports to depict the real, it comes under suspicion. If, like history, it deals with a
reality which is no longer available—the past—it is doubly suspect. It is sus-
pected of representing things not as they really happened but as they ought to
have happened—according to what is thought to make a good story.
Worse still, history may be obeying not aesthetic but political or ideological
rules. We all know the uses to which history has been put by authoritarian re-
gimes. In our society, even where it still speaks in the traditional narrative voice,
history often clothes itself in the authority of an academic discipline claiming to
tell us the truth about the past, to be not fiction but fact. But as narrative, accord-
ing to these authors, it can no longer uphold this claim. History must, at the very
least, be recognized as a mixture of fiction and fact. Indeed, it seems that the
whole distinction between fiction and nonfiction must be questioned.
b. A Response
We have outlined the challenge to the distinction between history and fiction.
It is time to respond to it.
The first thing to be noted about this challenge is that it places its advocates,
perhaps unwittingly, in league with the positivists. Barthes, Mink, et al. empha-
size those features of historical discourse which differentiate it from scientific
explanation, but instead of defending history as a legitimate cognitive enterprise
in its own right, they challenge its cognitive pretensions. For the positivists, his-
tory could become a respectable form of knowledge only if it were to cast off its
“literary” garb and replace story-telling with causal explanations. For the authors
we are examining, too, it is the literary form of history which seems to prevent it
from making claims to knowledge.
Agreeing with the positivists is not necessarily wrong, as if a theory could be
proven guilty by association. The fact is, however, that this agreement derives
from some tacit assumptions that these theories share—again, unwittingly—
with the positivists, assumptions which can be shown to be dubious at best.
These assumptions concern the three basic concepts we found combined in the
challenge to the distinction between history and fiction, namely narrative, imagi-
nation, and fiction itself. They could also be described as assumptions about real-
ity, about knowledge, and about what fiction is.
The first assumption concerns the alleged contrast between narrative and the
reality it is supposed to depict. Stories portray events which are framed by begin-
ning, middle, and end, which exhibit plot structures, intentions and unintended
consequences, reversals of fortune, happy or unhappy endings, and a general co-
herence in which everything has a place. Reality, we are told, is not like that. In the
real world things just happen, one after the other, in ways which may seem random
to us but are in fact strictly determined by causal laws. Of course such a reality bears
no resemblance to narrative form, and so narrative seems completely inappropriate
to it. Story-telling seems to impose on reality a totally alien form. Conceived in this
way, purely in terms of its structure, narrative seems necessarily to distort reality.
The second tacit assumption of this view, it seems to me, involves a strong
opposition between knowledge and imagination. Knowledge is a passive mirror-
ing of reality. Imagination, by contrast, is active and creative, and if imagination
gets involved in the process of knowing, and actively creates something in the
process, then the result can no longer qualify as knowledge.
The third assumption is that there is really no difference between fiction and
falsehood or falsification. What history, and other humanities too, are being ac-
cused of doing is wittingly or unwittingly presenting a false rather than a true
picture of the world. This is what is meant by calling them fictional or claiming
that they contain fictional elements.
I propose now to examine these three assumptions in reverse order.
c. Fiction and Falsehood

First, the use of the term “fiction” to mean “falsehood” creates a conceptual
confusion which needs to be straightened out before we can decide whether a
valid point is being made here. Falsehood can occur as the deliberate assertion
of untruth—lying—or simply as error. “Fiction,” as we usually use that term, is
neither, since it makes no claim to represent reality. Novels, plays, and films
principally portray persons who never existed and actions and events that
never occurred. What is more, this is understood by author and audience alike.
What is truly remarkable is that in spite of this knowledge we can get emotion-
ally caught up in the lives of fictitious persons. But no untruth is being told
here, at least not in the sense that someone is making a mistake, deceiving or
being deceived. In a sense, in fiction the question of truth or falsity simply
doesn’t arise.
Of course the question of truth in fiction can be raised on other levels: Fiction
can be more or less true to life, i.e., lifelike or plausible. If fiction is true in this
sense we mean that it portrays things as they might have been, even though we
know (or assume) that they were not so. At a higher level fiction can be truthful
in the sense that it conveys—perhaps indirectly—truths about the human con-
dition, or about art, or nature, in general. And if fiction can be true in both of
these senses, it can be false as well. But neither of these senses of truth and falsity
concerns the reality of the persons and events portrayed.
Must we not say that fictional statements are literally false? Some statements
in fiction, as already noted, are not (e.g., “London is usually foggy in the late
fall”). But even an explicitly fictional statement (e.g., “On a Friday afternoon in
the late fall of 1887 a tall man crossed London Bridge, deeply immersed in his
own thoughts”) could, by coincidence, be true. The statement, in that context,
would still be fictional. Why? How do we distinguish between fiction and non-
fiction? Writing on “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” John Searle
(1979), after comparing a journalist’s account with a novel, concludes that “there
is no textual property, syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work
of fiction.” Instead, the identifying criterion “must of necessity lie in the illocu-
tionary intentions of the author”—that is, in what the author is trying to do by
writing this text (p. 65). These intentions are usually indicated outside the text,
e.g., by labeling it “a novel,” as opposed, for example, to a memoir, an autobiogra-
phy, or a history. These terms tell the reader how to take the statements made in
the text—including whether the question of their truth should arise or not.
Searle’s point should be compared with that of Roland Barthes, cited above:
When he asks whether there is any “linguistic” feature distinguishing historical
from fictional discourse, he is referring to what Searle calls its “syntactic or se-
mantic” properties. Searle agrees with him that there is none. But in typically
structuralist fashion, Barthes overlooks those extra-textual features, such as the
author’s intentions and the whole conventional setting of the text, which for
Searle constitute the difference.
The criterion for distinguishing fiction from nonfiction is thus not that the
former consists largely of statements that are untrue; rather, it is that these state-
ments are intended by the author not to be true, and not to be taken as true, and
are in fact not so taken by the audience as well. If the character in a novel resem-
bles an actual person, and is even portrayed as doing some things that person did,
we might say the novel was “based on a true story,” or even that the resemblance
was an amazing coincidence, but we wouldn’t reclassify it as nonfiction. To take
a contrasting case: In a historical account of the Empress Hsu Tsi of China (Sea-
grave 1992), the author describes previous accounts of his subject as getting
things so wrong, even to the point of attributing to the Empress the actions of
another person altogether, that we would have to conclude that there was no one
person at all who did the things described (pp. 11–17). Would we then move it
to the fiction section of the library? Of course not: It remains history, even if it
is extremely bad history.
When the claim is made that history contains fiction, or elements of fiction,
or more broadly that it calls into question the boundary between history and
fiction, surely this does not mean that historians are making statements they and
their audience know to be about things that never happened, or whose truth or
falsity are not important. Historians certainly intend and claim to speak of real
persons and events and to tell us true things about them. If the first assumption
is even to make sense, the point must be that, knowingly or unknowingly, histo-
rians are doing something like what fiction writers do—imagining things as they
might have been, perhaps, rather than representing them as they were—and that
because of this the truth of what they say is somehow questionable. The claim is
not just that their results are untrue—something that would have to be shown
in each case—but that they must be untrue or that their truth or falsity is in prin-
ciple undecidable, apparently because of whatever the historian shares with the
novelist.
d. Knowledge and Imagination

And what is that? Presumably the capacity to imagine. Thus if our interpretation
of the first assumption is correct, it makes sense only if the second assumption is
true. The capacity to imagine is opposed to knowledge as if they were mutually
exclusive. Knowledge as “representation” is thought to be the passive reflection
of the real, simply registering or reporting what is there. But this is a naïve and
simplistic conception of knowledge which ignores some of the best insights of
modern philosophy. Since Kant we have recognized that knowledge is anything
but passive, its result not merely a copy of external reality. Rather, it is an activity
which calls into play many “faculties,” including sense, judgment, reason, and,
very importantly, the capacity to conceive of things being other than they actu-
ally are. It may be thought that anything that is the object of the imagination must
be imaginary in the sense of nonexistent. But this is only part of what we mean
by imagination. In the broadest sense, imagination is best described as the capac-
ity to envision what is not directly present to the senses. In this sense we can
imagine things that were, or will be, or exist elsewhere, as well as things that don’t
exist at all.
Is fiction a product of the imagination? It certainly is. But so, it could be said,
is physics; and so is history—though none of these is a product of the imagina-
tion only. If the historian draws on the imagination, it is in order to speak about
how things were, not to conjure up something imaginary. The difference be-
tween knowledge and fiction is not that the one uses imagination and the other
doesn’t. It is rather that in one case imagination, in combination with other ca-
pacities, is marshaled in the service of producing assertions, theories, predic-
tions, and in some cases narratives, about how the world really is, or will be, or
was; and in the other case it is used to produce stories about characters, events,
actions, and even worlds that never were. Thus the second assumption, like the
first, dissolves upon closer examination. Historians use their imagination—
along with other capacities, of course, like sense, judgment, and reason—not to
produce fiction but to make claims about the real world—in particular, to pro-
duce narrative accounts of how things really happened. So what is it about these
accounts that renders them “fictional,” in the sense of untrue, i.e., that prevents
them from counting as genuine knowledge? This brings us to the third assump-
tion, which is that narrative can never give us an account of how things really
happened, because “the way things really happen” is utterly at odds with the
narrative form.
e. Narrative and Reality

This view seems to me an expression of the one of the deepest assumptions our
authors share with the positivists. This is the idea that in order to qualify as real
the world must be utterly devoid of those intentional, meaningful, and narrative
features we attribute to it when we tell stories about it. Reality must be a mean-
ingless sequence of external events, and time must be nothing but a series of
nows, and anything else we attribute to it is at best mere fantasy or wishful think-
ing, at worst imposition or distortion. What is somehow forgotten is that history
is not about the physical but about the human world. That is, it is principally
about persons—and groups of persons—and about their actions. But if these
are to be understood they must be related to the intentions, hopes, fears, expec-
tations, plans, successes, and failures of those who act. It can be argued (and
I have argued at length elsewhere) that the human world manifests a concrete
version of the narrative form in the very structure of action itself. The means/
end structure of action is a prototype of the beginning/middle/end structure of
narrative, and it can be said that human beings live their lives by formulating and
acting out stories that they implicitly tell both to themselves and others. Indeed,
in this realm time itself is human, narratively shaped by beings who live their
lives not from moment to moment, but by remembering what was and project-
ing what will be. Although it is assuredly embedded in the physical world and is
datable, human time is not that of the numbered sequence (t1, t2, etc.) or even
the time of before and after, earlier and later, but the time of past and future as
experienced from the vantage point of the present by conscious, intentional
agents.
If this is so, then the narrative form inheres not only in the telling of history
but also in what is told about. Those who argue against this view often point out
that life is often messy and disorganized, that it does not have the “coherence,
integrity, fullness and closure” (Hayden White) of fictional stories: Things go
wrong, randomness intrudes, actions have unintended consequences, etc. But
they overlook two things: One is that this is the very reality the best fictional
stories are about; only the worst detective stories and Harlequin romances have
the kind of boringly predictable “closure” White has in mind. Second, life can be
messy and disorganized because we live it according to plans, projects, and “sto-
ries” that often go wrong—that is, because it has, overall, the narrative and tem-
poral structure I have tried to describe.
But the real opposition to the view I have outlined stems, I believe, from the
belief that the only true “reality” is physical reality. This is, as I have said, the
basis of positivist metaphysics, but it is also one of the deeply rooted prejudices
of our age. Somehow the world of physical objects in space and time, the world
of what is externally observable, describable, and explainable in terms of me-
chanical pushes and pulls, and predictable by means of general laws, counts as
reality in the primary sense. Everything else—human experience, social rela-
tions, cultural and aesthetic entities—is secondary, epiphenomenal, and “merely
subjective;” and the only true explanation of it is going to trace it back to the
physical world.
Now there may be a good metaphysical argument for the primacy of physical
reality and even for the primacy of physical explanation—though I have never
seen either. But such arguments would not be relevant to the point I am trying to
make. As conscious human beings acting in the world, the intentions, meanings,
cultural structures, and values, not only of ourselves but also of others, are as real
as anything we know. They are real in a sense that can never be touched by meta-
physical speculations—that is, they matter. Even the physical world enters into
this picture, but not as a merely objective realm. It is the constant background
and theater of operations for human actions, and it comes laden with economic,
cultural, and aesthetic value for the persons and communities who live in it. This
is nature not “in itself,” but nature as experienced, inhabited, cultivated, ex-
plored, and exploited by human beings and societies.
Whether it is real or unreal, more real or less real in some abstract metaphysi-
cal sense, it is this humanly real world that history, and other forms of truth-tell-
ing or nonfictional narrative, like biography and autobiography, are about. Nar-
rative is appropriate to it because the structures of narrative are already inherent
in human reality. The historian does not have to “reinscribe” lived time into natu-
ral time by the act of narration, as Ricoeur says; lived time is already there before
the historian comes along. To tell stories about the human past is not to impose
an alien structure on it but is continuous with the very activity that makes up the
human past.
This is not to say that every historical narrative is true, or that some narra-
tives are not better than others: It is simply to deny that narratives are incapable
of being true just because they are narratives. Likewise, when we spoke of the
role of imagination, we were not claiming that every use of the imagination in
history is legitimate, only that not everything produced by the imagination
need be merely imaginary. I will not try to answer in a definitive way the ques-
tion of how we evaluate narrative accounts in history and how we distinguish
the better from the worse. But we shall see that it involves more than just check-
ing sources.
f. An Example
It may be helpful at this point to test some of the things we have been saying by
considering an example of historical discourse. I choose quite deliberately a pas-
sage that some historians may regard as an extreme case. In Landscape and
Memory, Simon Schama (1995) describes Sir Walter Ralegh planning his Guiana
expedition in Durham House, London:
From his lofty vantage point on the north bank, where the Thames
made a snaking, southern bend, Ralegh could survey the progress of
empire: the dipping oars of the queen’s state barge as it made its way
from Greenwich to Sheen; bunched masts of pinnaces and carracks
swaying at their berths; broad- sterned Dutch fly boats bouncing on
the dock-tide; wherries taking passengers to the Southwark theaters;
the whole humming business of the black river. But through the miry
soup of refuse that slapped at his walls, Ralegh could see the waters of
the Orinoco, as seductively nacreous as the pearl he wore on his ear.
(p. 311)
There are several things we must note about this passage: The first is that it is
obviously not fictional in any conventional sense of the word. It is presented as
part of a historical account which is clearly marked as such in all the conven-
tional ways. What this indicates to us is that the author intends in this particu-
lar passage to portray something that really happened, not some imaginary
scene.
Second, there are core features of this passage that can obviously be backed
up by historical evidence: Ralegh’s presence in Durham House during the plan-
ning of his expedition; the view of the Thames available from that place; the
boats that could be seen on the Thames at that time, together with their descrip-
tions; even the pearl in Ralegh’s ear. (I have no idea whether there actually is evi-
dence for any of these things, or for that matter against them; it is just that they
are susceptible of confirmation by reference to sources.)
Third, the imagination of the author is clearly at work here, not in producing
an imaginary scene but in bringing together these various elements to portray
something real. Schama doesn’t even say Ralegh did but only that he could survey
the “whole humming business of the black river” visible from his vantage point.
Of course, as a sailor Ralegh would hardly have overlooked it. Schama goes fur-
ther, though, when he says that what Ralegh could see in this busy scene was “the
progress of empire.” At the very least this tells us that the actual scene did sym-
bolize the progress of empire, whether Ralegh saw it that way or not.
Of course, Schama is suggesting that he did see it that way; and further, in the
climax of the passage, that Ralegh not only could but did see, “through the miry
soup” of the Thames before him, the waters of the Orinoco. What has Schama
done here? He has described Ralegh’s view of things, his state of mind, as it may
have been during a particular time. Earlier we described “true to life” fiction as
portraying events as they might have been. Is Schama not doing something close
to that? Perhaps, but again Schama’s intention as a historian is to portray the real;
and what is more, the whole passage could be seen as building a case for saying
Ralegh actually did see things this way. It is not a conclusive case, needless to say,
but it does give us reasons for accepting Schama’s descriptions as veridical. It
provides a form of evidence, if you will—different from reference to sources, but
evidence still—for believing his account.
Of course, the persuasiveness of this passage has another source, and that is
the larger narrative of which it is a part. The passage itself describes only Ralegh’s
activity at Durham House. But what he is doing there is planning an expedition,
so it is understandable that his thoughts should be on his goal. Here Ralegh is
presented as a human being in the human world. His physical surroundings are
not just impinging on him causally; they have significance for him, a significance
which is derived from their relation to a long-term project in which he is engaged.
In this sense they are embedded in a story which Ralegh is projecting before
himself and which he will proceed to act out. This is the primary narrative which
shapes the human time of Ralegh’s own past, present, and future. It is this first-
order narrative that Schama’s second-order narrative is about.
g. Conclusion
I hope the foregoing reflections support the conclusion that the distinction be-
tween fiction and history, in its commonsense form, is a valid one and must be
maintained. I have tried to show that current attempts to fudge this distinction
rest on a number of confusions and untenable tacit assumptions concerning the
nature of fiction, the role of imagination in knowledge, and the relation between
narrative and historical reality. These confusions and assumptions derive, we
have seen, from a consideration of the “literary” character of historical discourse
and from certain dubious metaphysical doctrines, ultimately derived from or
shared with positivism, about the nature of reality.
Of course history is a literary genre, and as such it shares many features with
fiction, notably the narrative form. Furthermore, like writers of fiction, histori-
ans use their imagination. But it does not follow from this that history merges
with fiction or that these elements eo ipso introduce falsehood into historical
knowledge or make it impossible to distinguish the true from the false. Histori-
ans avail themselves of these elements precisely in order to tell the truth about
human events in the past. Whether they actually succeed in doing so in any par-
ticular case is another matter, to be decided by appeal to evidence, to consider-
ations of coherence, to psychological insight or theory, and many other things.
But their capacity for success cannot be ruled out simply on the grounds that
their inquiry makes use of imagination and narrative form. Far from standing in
the way of historical truth, these are appropriate means for achieving it. The
reason for this, I have tried to argue here, is that they derive from the very struc-
ture of historical reality and from the nature of human time.
2. Narrative Explanation
Narrative became a “hot topic” sometime in the late 1960s, and it has been ex-
amined from many perspectives since then. Its role as a literary genre has been
central, of course, where it was long discussed by literary theorists, and then
subjected to the careful analysis of the structuralists. It has been seen as a univer-
sal form of human expression found in folk-tales, novels, films, plays, paintings,
and comic strips; its ubiquity and transcultural character led to attempts to
found a new discipline called narratology, which would seek out and articulate
what was common to all these manifestations. While the concept turned up
fitfully in early (i.e., postwar), analytic philosophy of history, it was closely tied
to standard causal explanation. And through all this the idea of a distinctively
narrative form of explanation was largely unexplored. Do narratives explain, and
if so how? Does narrative explanation differ from other forms of explanation,
and if so how? This section is an attempt to answer some of these questions.
Let us begin with an example. Suppose that on a busy city street we see a
young man carrying a large potted plant that almost obscures his view, running
so fast that he risks colliding with other pedestrians, and shouting the name of a
woman in a very loud voice. When someone like this attracts our attention, his
action puzzles us. We want to know why he’s behaving in this strange way. We
seek an explanation.
We learn that he has returned home to find a note from his girlfriend with
whom he shares his apartment, but with whom he had been quarreling, saying
she has decided to leave him and move out. She has removed her belongings and
she is gone. The man is shaken and distraught. Then he notices that she has left
behind her favorite plant; and he learns from a neighbor that she left only a few
minutes ago and is walking in the direction of a friend’s apartment. Seizing on the
plant as a pretext to find her and beg her to return, he picks it up and runs into
the street, hoping to catch up with her.
Most of us would be satisfied with this account as an explanation of the man’s
action. We might ask for more details, but we don’t really need them. Our per-
plexity goes away; our question has been answered. We now know why he did
what he did.
What we have given is a typical narrative account. We have explained an action
by telling a story about it. The narrative has all the standard elements of a good
story. It has a central subject or protagonist. It has a beginning: We need not go
any farther back than his return to the empty apartment, though it helps to learn
that the two had been quarreling before that. That sets the scene. The story has a
middle, in which our hero reacts emotionally to the opening scene, assesses the
situation with the help of some new information (she just left), and decides to
take action. What he does then, running with the plant through the street and
shouting his girlfriend’s name, is where we came in, as it were. There is an ele-
ment of suspense here: Will he succeed? And the story has an end, even though
we don’t yet know exactly what it will be. He’ll catch up with her or he won’t. If
he does, he’ll be successful in winning her back, or he won’t. But this range of
alternatives, even though we don’t know which of them will occur, is determined
by the story so far. They belong to the story.
One thing to be noted about this explanation is that it is probably the same
one that the man would give for his own action. In fact, though I could have
gotten this explanation from someone else, I could also have gotten it from him,
if I had occasion to ask. This rather obvious fact suggests that the narrative mode
is very close in form to the structure of action itself, from the agent’s point of
view. An action emerges from the agent’s awareness of a situation, a desire to reach
a certain goal, and the choice of means to achieve it. In this case the agent is de-
scribing to me the situation as he perceived it, his reaction in forming the plan to
catch up with and plead with his girlfriend, and his decision to pick up the plant
and rush into the street to carry out his plan. All of these elements are part of the
action, whether or not the man tells anyone about it. So it’s not the case that the
action receives its structure from the story that’s told about it. Whether he tells
the story or I tell it about him on the basis of information received elsewhere, the
action is there beforehand and the story neatly corresponds to and recounts or
renders the action in explicitly narrative form. The story seems to borrow its
form from the very action it is about. It may be objected that people often act
impulsively and only afterward give structure to their action by telling a story
which reconstructs the reasons for the action in retrospect. This may be true in
some cases, but certainly not all. And even when it is true, it does not follow that
the reconstruction is somehow incorrect or disingenuous. Again, it may some-
times be so, but to argue that it is always so would require a theory of motives
which would have to be justified on terms which take us far beyond ordinary
discourse.
A second thing that stands out about this explanation is that it is perfectly in
line with everyday discourse and “common sense.” These are slippery terms, but
I mean it reflects the way we talk about our own actions and those of others as we
deal in the ordinary way with the world around us. For most purposes, such an
account of an action would be accepted at face value and we would not be in-
clined to inquire further. Of course, questions might arise about whether the
man was telling the truth, especially if his story conflicted with another story—
say, his girlfriend’s story—of the same events. Here we would indeed have a le-
gitimate reason to question the agent’s narrative account of his own action. If it
became important for some reason to settle the discrepancy, we might have to
call in other witnesses and ask for their accounts of the same action.
This could take us from the everyday into the world of legal or juridical insti-
tutions, where someone—a judge or jury—would have to decide which account
of the action to believe. A journalist might have similar concerns, wanting to re-
construct “what really happened” out of the varying accounts of the original
events. Historians, too, often see their task as reconstruction of the past along
these lines. Here the value of hindsight is that it can reveal its own perspective on
the original story. Not only do different participants have different perceptions
of what happened, but those looking back can assess the importance of unin-
tended consequences ranging far beyond the perspectives and aims of the origi-
nal participants. The actions of political leaders during the Cold War, for exam-
ple, look very different to us after its conclusion than they did to agents,
participants, and observers while it was going on. The assassins of Archduke
Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, or Martin Luther in 1519, would have recounted
their actions in terms very different from the ones we now use to tell the story of
what they did, knowing as we do the vast consequences of their actions.
But even if we leave the original story behind, or place it alongside other sto-
ries, in search of the truth about the action in question, we have not departed
from the kind of account we started with—a story which recounts the action by
starting from its meaning for those involved: its initiation in a perceived set of
circumstances, its execution according to plan and means, and its arrival at its
conclusion. Even in the juridical, journalistic, and historical contexts, this kind
of account is usually judged perfectly adequate. It ends an inquiry that began
with a puzzle or an anomaly, an event we can describe (a man running wildly
through the street, a general’s withdrawal of his troops just when they have an
advantage, a risky political tactic) but which initially doesn’t make sense to us. In
keeping with this description, we can say what happened, but we want to know
why. The story answers the question and provides us with the sense we need,
often in such a way that the original act is re-described in a manner derived from
the larger story in which it is now embedded. As a result of an investigation into
discrepancies and inconsistencies, we may end with a story that is different from
the one we started with, but it’s still a story, in the sense that it has all the standard
features we described above.
Two important questions arise out of the account so far: Why is a narrative
account generally satisfying? And how does it explain?
We might say that the narrative explanation is satisfying precisely because it
never strays far from ordinary discourse. The content of the story may in the end
depart considerably in content from that of the surface story we began with—
say, the agent’s own account—but its proximity in form and style to our day-to-
day dealing in human situations lends it an air of familiarity that we may find
comforting. Familiarity is reassuring, especially when contrasted with the pros-
pect of veering into the hidden and the arcane. The familiarity of the narrative
context also opens up immediately recognizable strategies for dealing with the
situation, if indeed we are called on to intervene. In other words, the kind of
understanding we achieve through telling a story is also the kind that can lead, if
need be, to action.
The familiarity of the context of narrative helps answer our second question:
How does narrative explain? If we start from a puzzling action, as we did in our
example, the story we tell places that action in temporal continuum, relating it to
previous actions and events that led up to it, and it places the action also in rela-
tion to a future scenario or set of possible futures. The original action was puz-
zling in part because we didn’t have its temporal context—we didn’t know, liter-
ally, where the young man was coming from and we didn’t know where he was
going. The story doesn’t have the character of a mere chronicle, however; it se-
lects the relevant and leaves out the irrelevant, and it does this, I would say, by
appealing to the familiar. A lovers’ quarrel, a feeling of distress and a desire to
remedy an emotionally fraught situation, even an impulsive action like running
into the street: These are all things, actions, and situations we can recognize
right off, and our narrative performs the function of placing the puzzling action
not only in a temporal context but also within a familiar repertoire of actions,
emotions, and motives. These are things we’ve seen before, and we illuminate
the unfamiliar by relating it to the familiar. No doubt some version of the so-
called covering law enters in here, since we tacitly appeal in part to general ten-
dencies and patterns, repeatable instances of the way people are and the ways
they act.
Causality, however, with which the early covering-law theorists tried to link
the elements of a narrative, is totally out of place here. A perceived situation, an
emotional reaction, taking on a goal and initiating a plan for reaching it—these
do not cause the action but serve to motivate it. What’s the difference? It’s not
just that the “laws” in question are so tenuous and of such limited application, or
that we could never deduce the action from their conjunction with the anteced-
ents, as Hempel’s early critics pointed out. It’s that the causal account leaves out
a conscious agent whose relation to the antecedent situation is at least a subjec-
tive and practical if not a deliberative one. Consciousness and at least some
degree of reflection are elements of the initiation of the action.
These are some of the elements, then, of how narratives explain and why for
the most part they satisfy us.
But it’s another matter if we leave the context of the everyday and enter the
domain of the “scientific.” In one way or another, any account of an action which
aspires to “scientific” status will likely not be satisfied with such a narrative expla-
nation. The term “scientific” is itself very broad, of course, as we shall see, but a
common element of most approaches which bear this name is precisely their
departure from commonsense or ordinary discourse. It is the vocation of sci-
ence, historically and culturally, to go beyond the surface of things, to penetrate
behind what Wilfred Sellars called the “manifest image” of the world, to cast off
appearance and arrive at reality. Modern physical science serves as the paradigm:
According to most accounts, it began when the commonsense explanations in-
herited from Aristotle were rejected. Copernicus overturned our everyday ob-
servations of the heavens, and physics has never looked back, taking us ever
farther from common sense.
In the context of human actions, however, there are several ways of looking at
this move away from narrative explanation. Its defenders would probably say
that as soon as our search for knowledge of the events gets serious, narrative
explanation is simply not satisfying. Story-telling, after all, does not seem
intellectually respectable, much less scientific. It leaves too many questions

open: Given the initial situation, for example, why did the man react in the way
he did rather than some other way? Does the narrative provide sufficient condi-
tions for the action in questions, or even necessary ones? There are too many
possible “why” questions left unanswered, questions that would have to be an-
swered by adopting a different approach. Further, the narrative explanation
seems to require that we depart from observation and engage in some dubious
speculation, such as attributing thoughts, motives, and intentions to the agent.
We may be dependent on self-observations and reports by the agent about his
own action, which we must then interpret. Science, by contrast, supposedly re-
quires that we stick to what we can derive from observable events. The same
patterns of inquiry that have been so successful in dealing with other observable
phenomena should work for these human events too. They are, after all, just part
of the observable world. This world obeys laws that are everywhere the same.
Motives and intentions are ruled out; they don’t belong in physical or biological
accounts.
Here we are getting at the origins of a very old and familiar debate, and I want
to relate the discussion of narrative to its antecedents in the history of reflection
on explanation. The early positivists wanted to find in human events the same
relation between observations and laws found in non-human events. The emerg-
ing idea of “social science” proposed to find in the human world the laws which
governed its behavior in the same way that physical laws governed the behavior
of inanimate objects. From the 19th century down to Hempel’s covering-law
model of the 1940s, hopes and demands were high for a genuinely scientific ap-
proach to human behavior and for a convergence of all sciences around a single
model of explanation.
Those unconvinced by this development allowed the term “explanation” to
be co-opted by the reductionists and contrasted it with what they called “under-
standing.” The point was not to explain but to understand the action, and at-
tempts were made to describe the process of understanding in terms of a method
that had its own rigor and even scientific character. It was here, beginning with
the work of Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, that the idea of the Geisteswissen-
schaften was born; thus, while they relinquished the goal of explanation, they
still wanted to be scientific, in their own way.
But the point was to understand the action from the agent’s point of view, and
this meant discerning by empathy and analogy what was going on in the agent’s
mind. Language had to be interpreted, which brought the notion of hermeneu-
tics into play. To what extent was the interpretation of language, whether in texts
or in the statements of individuals about their actions, capable of following a
clearly defined method? The battle between the models of Erklären and of Verste-
hen continued unabated into the 20th century and reproduced itself in debates
among philosophers of social science and philosophers of history. The advocates

of Verstehen did not initially employ the concept of narrative, which entered the
scene somewhat later. We shall return to this point in a moment.
The mid-20th-century unity-of-science movement, to which Hempel be-
longed, was only one manifestation of these debates. At the time it was linked to
a behaviorist psychology that was at odds with other models, such as the psy-
choanalytic, which also claimed the dignity of scientific status. For the psycho-
analytically inclined too, the straightforward narrative account was deemed in-
sufficient, and the explanation had to penetrate beyond the surface of things, in
this case by dealing in unconscious motives. For example, why did the girlfriend
leave the plant behind? Was this not an unconscious message that her departure
was not a complete break and that the outcome was still negotiable? Did the man
not unconsciously realize this when he took the plant as his pretext for chasing
after her? Behaviorists would object that such explanations do not leave the lan-
guage of motives, reasons, and narrative behind but just replace the common-
sense story with a farfetched second-level story based on speculatively con-
structed unconscious reasons and motives.
Nowadays, of course, both the behaviorist and the psychoanalytic approaches
have long since largely gone out of fashion, and any scientific explanation worthy
of the name would have to employ neurological concepts. Once again the com-
monsense level of discourse, where we find narrative explanations, would be
replaced by sophisticated accounts centered on the brain and nervous system.
Neurobiology and cognitive psychology would provide the conceptual reper-
toire, rounded out in the end by concepts derived from evolutionary biology as
the matrix for all explanation of behavior. Commonsense accounts, including
narrative explanations, have meanwhile been provided, from this perspective,
with a new name: “folk psychology,” they are called, on the analogy of folk medi-
cine, which has long since been superseded by scientific medicine. Common-
sense discourse about human behavior is thus seen as a kind of aspiring but de-
ficient science, trying hard but failing to do what real science is now, presumably,
able—or soon will be able—to do, namely to explain, predict, and control human
behavior. Neurophysiological explanations are at least conceivable even if they
are not immediately available. But the distance between these and evolutionary
explanations is still so great that the whole enterprise has the character of a
promissory note pending a great deal of future research. It is not clear in any case
how an evolutionary account could ever get beyond the explanation of general
traits or dispositions and descend to the level of particular motivations and
reasons.
On the other side of the debate, the concept of narrative started being taken
seriously in the 1960s as a supplement, or even as an alternative, to such notions
as Verstehen, empathy, and hermeneutics. One reason for this is that these
concepts are too much centered on individual actions and the reasons given for
acting. Even interpretation, at least in its pre-Gadamerian sense, seems to focus
on recapturing an act of thought that lies behind and gives meaning to a linguis-
tic expression. The idea of telling a story about what people do seems broader
and richer in its scope than that of simply understanding their actions, though it
may involve this too. A story seems capable of encompassing multiple actions
and events, as well as longer-term actions, sub-actions, and reactions to events;
it calls attention to the narrator’s retrospective point of view, introducing the
ironic element of viewing actions in relation to their unintended as well as their
intended consequences; and it appeals to a logic of the flow of actions through
time, a structure of events which gives them a distinctive form. These features
make it seem especially appropriate for history, which is interested in individual
actions, but only as they fit into larger patterns of events that range far beyond
particular persons and particular events. Thus many historians and philosophers
of history, who had reacted negatively to Hempel’s covering-law approach to
history because it seemed to be so at variance with the way historians actually
think and write, embraced the concept of narrative as the key to historical
knowledge.
To be sure, the emphasis on narrative in history was opposed by another cur-
rent within the discipline, the turn to social and economic explanation which
started with the Annales school in France and soon spread far and wide in the
historical profession. This development was directed against the focus on indi-
viduals and their actions in traditional political history, whose accounts had
typically been presented in narrative form. Again, the move away from story-
telling was represented as making history more scientific and less literary. But
there was more to it than that. Underlying the work of Fernand Braudel in his
The Mediterranean, usually considered the outstanding and characteristic work
of this school, is not just an epistemological but also a metaphysical view of his-
tory. His well-known extended metaphor, drawn from the sea itself, places “tradi-
tional history” at the level of “surface agitations,” the “brief, rapid, nervous oscil-
lations” of histoire évènementielle. These are the events that individuals have “felt,
described, lived according to the rhythm of their lives, brief as our own.” But
this level is moved, unbeknown to these individuals, by the deeper-lying and
slower-moving currents of social history, that of peoples and groups and their
economic and cultural forces. This second level, however, presupposes a third,
even deeper and “almost immobile history” of the relations of humans with
their environment, the “geographical time” of climate, sea, soil, and agriculture
(Braudel 1969, pp. 11f.).
Here we can say not that men make history, but that “history makes men and
fashions their destiny.” This is the “longue durée,” the “anonymous, profound, and
often silent” domain which covertly determines everything above it (p. 21). This
view is metaphysical in the sense that it is an expression of what history essen-

tially is, of what has ontological priority and what is secondary and derived.
This metaphysics of history has its epistemological consequences, of course,
and they lead inevitably to the measurable, the countable, and the statistical.
Thus history for Braudel is one of the social sciences whose method is increas-
ingly that of mathematical models (p. 61). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, another
Annales historian, is well known for stating that “history that is not quantifiable
cannot claim to be scientific” (see Roberts 2001, p. 283). But some historians,
French and British, who have followed the lead of the Annales school have devel-
oped a more modest view of what is to be gained by the quantitative approach.
François Furet, in a now-classic study from 1975, describes the move from narra-
tive history to what he calls the “problem-oriented history” of demographics
and statistics. He thinks that history has undoubtedly gained by opening up
new topics and new methods, but he doubts that history has in the process
become more scientific. It is “incorrect to believe,” he writes, “that the passage
from narrative history to problem-oriented history . . . suffices to enter ipso facto
into the scientific domain of the demonstrable” (p. 279). Nor will narrative his-
tory ever be supplanted. But it will, he thinks, be enriched and improved by the
new developments.
Lawrence Stone, the British historian who had himself contributed to the rise
of social history, is in the end more skeptical than Furet. In a well-known 1979
paper, though he praises the work of the major social historians, like Braudel, he
thinks that the findings of much quantitative history are a smokescreen meant to
bedazzle its audience, “often expressed in so mathematically recondite a form
that they are unintelligible to the majority of the historical profession” (p. 283).
The focus was on population, birth and death records, food supply, prices, and
other such quantifiable items, to the neglect of the values, customs, culture, and
actions of groups and individuals. Moreover, the sources that provide data to the
mathematically inclined historians are often sketchy and unreliable. Stone con-
cludes that “quantification has not fulfilled the high hopes of twenty years ago”
(p. 288). “Economic and demographic determinism has collapsed in the face of
the evidence,” he writes (p. 293), and he finds much evidence for a return to nar-
rative in the historical profession at large. Like Furet, he values the better contri-
butions to quantitative history but rejects the scientistic pretentions often ad-
vanced by their authors. In the end, the whole dispute seems to have been
downgraded to a difference in emphasis.
When we think of narrative as it has functioned in history, how close are we
to the idea of commonsense narrative explanation with which we began? On the
whole those who have championed narrative have been reluctant to think of it as
a form of explanation, continuing in the practice of reserving that term for causal
accounts. “Understanding” still seems the preferred term, even though it has
clearly been extended beyond its original association with ideas of empathy and
interpretation.
One of the interesting features of the turn to narrative, however, at least in
relation to history, is that it soon intersected with the theory of literature, where
narrative had long been a topic of interest. In the process, its significance as a
mode of explanation or understanding changed considerably. Hayden White
was a key figure here, of course. In keeping with structuralist theories of narra-
tive, story-telling was primary associated with creative fiction, and the emphasis
was on the patterns and conventions of constructing narratives, not only in
novels but also in films, theater, and even comic strips. White is primarily a phi-
losopher of history, but he sees historical writing as a “literary artifact.” The link
to commonsense discourse is severed, or at least neglected, and the difference
between narrative and the everyday world becomes more important than what
they have in common. From Barthes and Foucault, White picks up the idea that
in history, narrative structures are imposed on the past by those in power for the
sake of domination and control.
Paul Ricoeur is very much influenced by Hayden White but takes this line of
reasoning in a slightly different direction. For Ricoeur narrative is an essential
feature of human existence by which we humanize and thus deal with time. It
gives our individual and social existence sensible contours and projects, and thus
gives meaning to life. It does this in both fiction and history, and also in religion.
The biblical narrative is never far from Ricoeur’s mind, as he discusses the role of
narrative in the creation of the self.
Ricoeur never goes so far as to collapse the distinction between fiction and
history, but he does talk about the ways in which they are interwoven, and he is
more interested in these than in the differences. In the end his theory of narrative
is focused on its literary productions, whether fictional or historical, and he is
more interested in how these affect and transform everyday life than how they
arise out of it.
In short, at the hands of these two important authors, the putative explana-
tory role of narrative was not an issue. They both had a great deal to say about
narrative, and about history, but the idea that story-telling could serve a role in
the social sciences or in history, answering our questions about social events, and
about the human past, was not their concern. The gap they opened up between
narrative in its literary guise and the everyday world of action and experience
made it seem unlikely that this connection could be re-established. The perhaps
unwitting irony of this development, however, is that these authors join hands
with the positivistically inclined social scientists in not taking narrative seriously
as a candidate for explanatory significance. For White narrative is imposed on a
non-narrative world, distorting it and thus concealing rather than revealing it.
For Ricoeur narrative takes up certain features of the pre-narrative world, but its
primary function is to transform it into something new rather than discover its
truth. In the end, its function is ethical rather than epistemological.
Thus we can see that for various reasons narrative, which seems to function
very well in ordinary life as a mode of explanation, has not fared very well at the
hands of theorists who are concerned in various ways with human actions and
events. After examining some of the contexts in which this rejection of narrative
has occurred, it might be useful to examine some of the motives behind it. It
would seem that narrative is judged as providing either too little or too much.
We have mentioned the motives that go along with moving beyond common
sense to science. Here it would seem that a story-type explanation can seem inad-
equate. But it is important to distinguish here between what we might call ideo-
logical and skeptical reasons. A healthy skepticism regarding common sense and
received opinion may be said to belong to any genuine inquiry worthy of the
name. An explanation, or even a mode of explanation, can be unsatisfying be-
cause it has the air of being superficial or incomplete. There can be reasons for
rejecting it or regarding it as insufficient. But it is altogether different to reject a
mode of explanation because it does not fit an a priori metaphysical conception
of reality. We saw this in the case of Braudel’s views on history. He has a very
broadly conceived metaphysical view of the essence of historical reality, and he
presents it with the help of some very striking metaphors. We can also assume
that this view is informed by long years of historical research; Braudel’s view is
supported by his eminence in the profession. But we can’t say that he actually
gives us arguments for it. His metaphysical views would have to be supported by
metaphysical arguments, and these he does not provide. So his theory of histori-
cal layers has the character of an a priori framework governing his research. Only
on the assumption of this framework does his disparaging view of ordinary his-
torical events have any justification.
Something similar seems to be going on in the move to neurological-evolu-
tionary explanations. The reductionist unity-of-science movement seems alive
and well among the practitioners of this approach. According to this view, be-
cause human action belongs to physical reality, and the workings of physical real-
ity are supposed a priori to be everywhere the same, any genuine explanation will
be in keeping with a causal-scientific approach borrowed from physical science.
Today, of course, it is biological reality that serves in this role. As we’ve seen, the
reduction of all reality to physical reality goes hand in hand with a reduction of
all science to physical science as the preferred model of scientific explanation.
The disparaging term “folk psychology,” applied to all inquiry that does not
follow this path, is really a bit of what we might call “persuasive terminology”
designed to achieve by rhetorical means what it does not attain by argument.
This strategy shows us better than anything else that we are dealing here with an
a priori commitment to a certain worldview rather than the results of scientific
inquiry. The view is that the commonsense world of social interaction, from
which many of our concepts of motivations, reasons, and even stories are drawn,
is really an outdated and failed, or at least inadequate, form of explanatory social
science. One thing that seems not to be considered is that the context of every-
day interaction might have other motivations than the search for laws, causal
explanations, prediction, and control that we associate with the ideas of natural
and biological science.
Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn is that it belongs to the spirit of inquiry
to be skeptical of commonsense and easy explanations, both in general and in
particular; but discarding a mode of explanation simply because it does not fit
an a priori ontological mold is not truly scientific. Thus if we depart from a
commonsense mode of explanation, such as narrative explanation, in favor of
another model, we had better have good reasons for doing so. It may be that in
some instances narrative explanation leaves us unsatisfied, and we need to go
deeper and in some cases shift conceptual frameworks. But I would maintain,
in good pragmatist fashion, that conceptual frameworks are meant to serve
inquiry and not the other way around. In other words, skepticism works both
ways and should apply equally to all unquestioned and unargued theoretical
commitments, whether they be commonsense or scientific-reductionist in
character.
If narrative explanation has seemed to the advocates of a reductive idea of “sci-
ence” to offer too little, to the theorists of literary narrative it has been thought to
offer too much. Telling a story about an event in order to make it comprehensible
is likened to a literary creation which embellishes and restructures the events
rather than illuminating them. Depending on whom one reads, literary values,
rhetorical tropes, or unconscious cultural patterns take the place of inquiry, and
we are left to judge the resulting narrative according to aesthetic and ethical
rather than epistemological criteria. Because retrospective narrative has in some
cases been used to distort the facts for propaganda purposes, in the interests of
power, it is thought that all narrative accounts must to some degree be guilty of
this, consciously or unconsciously. The assumption behind this is that narrative
structures are at odds with the real world and any attempt to apply the one to the
other will result in distortion. Narrative is thought to issue from an autonomous
mental or cultural realm which has no roots or connections beyond itself.
I hope that our previous exposition has shown up the fallacy in this mode of
reasoning. Story-telling obeys rules that are imbedded in action itself, and narra-
tive is at the root of human reality long before it gets explicitly told about. It is
because of this closeness of structure, between human action and narrative, that
we can genuinely be said to explain an action by telling a story about it.
I have been making this argument for a long time. It does not mean, as some
of my critics have assumed, that the true or only explanation of an action lies in
retrieving and stating the motives of the agent just as they were involved in the
action at the time it was performed. That account of explanation would be closer
to the classic idea of Verstehen, empathy, or the rational reconstruction theories
of Collingwood and Dray. Telling the story of an action, as we’ve seen, involves
more than just finding the motive, thought, or intention behind the action: It
ties the action to its background circumstances, its antecedent events, and its
subsequent results. Telling a more extended story, or contrasting the agent’s orig-
inal story with other accounts of the same event, often involves questioning the
prima facie reason and revising it. The explanatory story, in other words, may be
very different in many respects from the initial agent’s story. But the point of
emphasizing the sameness of form, between narrative explanation and what it
explains, is to show that the narrative explanation does not inhabit a different
conceptual universe from the narrated and hence explained original scene. In
fact, the business of revising motives and reassessing the reasons for action—
that is, changing the story—may set in during the course of the action itself. As
agents acting in the world we try to understand our own actions and experiences
as we go along, often revising our own story in the course of the action. So the
narrative account of the action, far from moving into a difference universe of dis-
course from the events it depicts, is located on a continuum of repeatedly revised
explanations, understandings, and interpretations that is part of life itself.
Not only is it “narratives all the way down,” then, but the story-telling never
ends. That is, there is no definitive story. As theorists as different as Dilthey and
Danto have pointed out, because of their hindsightful character narratives need
to be revised in light of later developments, and at the limit the full significance
of any event would have to await the end of history, or the end of time. This is
perhaps an aspect of narrative explanation that sometimes makes it frustrating,
rather than satisfying, to those in search of definitive answers. Narrative can sat-
isfy most of the time, as long as we do not expect too much of it. The satisfaction
we normally feel with a narrative explanation should not be taken at face value,
nor should it close off further inquiry. But there is no reason why we should not
take it for what it is, a valuable and useful implement in understanding human
action.
3. Epistemology and Ontology of Narrative

Among the many philosophical works devoted to narrative in recent years, Paul
Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative is perhaps the most influential. The three-volume
work examines narrative, and its relation to temporality, from almost every angle:
its relation to classical studies of temporality, its place in historical and fictional
works, and its ethical dimension in understanding human identity.
One question that may occur to the reader of this magisterial work is the fol-
lowing: What is the “philosophical” status of narrative? That is, is narrative an
epistemological principle, or is it an ontological concept? This question is espe-
cially important for readers who are interested in the implications of Ricoeur’s
theory for the philosophy of history. For such readers, the question can be for-
mulated thus: Is narrative merely a characteristic of historical knowledge, or is it
rather, or also, constitutive of the historical reality that is the object of such
knowledge? In other words, to invoke a classical distinction, does narrative apply
to the res gestae as well as to the historia rerum gestarum?
In the following I would like to give a positive response to this question. I will
try to explain in what sense narrative can be considered an ontological category,
and I will advance the claim that the epistemological function of narrative must
be based on its ontological character.
What is the connection between this project and that of Paul Ricoeur in Time
and Narrative? I will return to this question at the end, but I will begin with a few
brief indications. Ricoeur himself invokes the distinction between epistemol-
ogy and ontology when he speaks of different aspects of his general theory of
narrative, a theory which applies, as we know, to both history and fiction. In the
third volume, for example, referring to distinctions introduced in the first, he
identifies the “epistemological level” with “the configuration of time by narra-
tive,” and the “ontic level” with the “refiguration of time by narrative” (1985,
pp. 350f.). If I understand him correctly, this means that the act of narration, in
history for example, is the act through which our knowledge of the past is consti-
tuted. The resulting narrative, by contrast, would have an effect on the historical
process thanks to its reception by its readers, and thus contributes to the consti-
tution of historical reality itself. The historical text enters into relation with the
society to which it belongs: Think, for example, of the “classical” histories of the
French Revolution (Michelet, Tocqueville) and their influence on the course of
French history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thus there is an important connection, in the theory of Time and Narrative,
between the epistemological function of narrative and what is called the onto-
logical function. But this connection presupposes, in my view, a much more inti-
mate relation between the two functions, a relation that can be brought out in
much more explicit fashion. This is what I will attempt to do here. My reflections
will constitute a complement and a deepening, rather than a critique, of the
theory of Time and Narrative.
It should be noted that Ricoeur speaks, in the passage I quoted, of an “ontic”
rather than an “ontological” level. “Refiguration” resembles a causal relation be-
tween a text, on one side, and a series of events and actions, on the other. To be
sure, the notions of the reception and the influence of a text are much more com-
plicated than that. The received text has to be incorporated into social reality; it
becomes part of the social fabric. Nineteenth-century France becomes a society

that not only has (or had) a revolution, but has a revolution recounted and inter-
preted by its great historians. These interpretations become part of the historical
consciousness of the French—that is, they figure in the reality of their situation.
Thus just as metaphor, according to Ricoeur, permits a passage from the level of
“seeing-as” to that of “being-as,” so the historical interpretation of the past can
change our manner of being in the present and the future. The reference of a
historical narrative becomes a creative reference (1983, pp. 13f.).
But here, it seems to me, an important question arises: What must historical
reality be like—that is, the reality of political and social events and actions in
time—if it is to receive and assimilate into its existence these narrative interpre-
tations of its past? In other words, what is the “form” of a reality that permits the
reception of a narrative “content,” and sometimes even a change of content, influ-
enced by historians’ narratives? In the framework of such questions I see the
possibility of an “ontologization” of the concept of narrative—that is, the pos-
sibility of speaking of a narrative “mode of existence,” of a social and historical
reality whose being is already characterized by narrativity and not merely
known and influenced by historians’ narrations.
Before pursuing and elaborating on this notion of narrative existence, let us
consider, in a preliminary and somewhat methodological manner, the relation
between epistemology and ontology. For some, even the idea of narrative as an
epistemological function, rather than simply a literary genre, may be surprising.
It is to the analytic philosophy of history that we owe the recognition of this
epistemological aspect of narrative. Opposing the positivist idea that historical
narrative is nothing but the literary presentation of the results of causal explana-
tion, certain Anglophone philosophers, notably Arthur Danto (1965), W. B.
Gallie (1964), and Louis Mink (1987), showed convincingly that narrative con-
stitutes a sort of conceptual framework a priori that serves historians as a guide in
the research and organization of the “facts” of the past. To explain a human action
is to understand its meaning, and to arrive at this understanding is to find a co-
herent and plausible “story” in which this action can play a role. Thus, far from
being a superficial and nonessential feature of historical writing, narrative is what
Louis Mink calls a “cognitive instrument” for history, a “mode of comprehen-
sion” of the historical past, a conceptual framework as appropriate to the domain
of human actions and events as causal explanation is to the domain of physical
events.
If it is established that narrative plays this epistemological role of a mode of
comprehension, at least in history, it will be helpful to recall briefly the history
of the concept of hermeneutics with regard to this distinction between episte-
mology and ontology. The notion of hermeneutics shared by some of the great
philosophers of recent times, such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, is, as everyone
knows, the product of a remarkable development and expansion of the original

sense of this term. The word was first used to refer to the art or science of inter-
preting texts, especially sacred texts. The appearance of the term coincides his-
torically with the recognition that, in certain disciplines, knowledge consists not
in the explanation of events but in the understanding of meaning. Thus the term
begins its modern life as an epistemological designation with a fairly limited
application.
But eventually it was noticed that the problem indicated by the term “herme-
neutics,” originally limited to the interpretation of ancient and distant texts,
exists in other fields as well and applies to a much broader and more generalized
domain. In history, for example, where documents from the past have to be read
and understood, the existence and importance of the problem of interpretation
are obvious. But understanding language, grasping the meaning of other per-
sons’ utterances, occurs in the knowledge of our contemporaries as well, and not
just of our predecessors in time. And the grasp of meaning goes beyond even the
domain of language in the case of understanding art, music, and architecture.
These considerations led Dilthey to the conclusion that the problem of herme-
neutics is not limited to the interpretation of texts in the narrow sense, but oc-
cupies a central position in all the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and
marks the difference between these sciences and those of nature.
Strongly influenced by Dilthey, Heidegger (1957) takes a decisive step in the
history of the concept of hermeneutics. First, he is able to articulate in a much
more precise way than Dilthey the essential characteristics of hermeneutical un-
derstanding. He speaks of the Vorstuktur des Verstehens (p. 151), the structure of
“understanding in advance”: We approach human expression, whether linguistic
or non-linguistic, with a prior comprehension of what we are looking for, which
in turn may be influenced by the elements of meaning discovered in the detailed
examination of the expression. This is Heidegger’s version of the hermeneutical
circle, discussed by Dilthey in terms of the relation of wholes and parts. This
circularity contrasts with the essentially linear structure which is the ideal of
natural science since its mathematization at the dawn of the modern age. Hei-
degger insists that this circularity is neither a logical failing, nor an impediment
to knowledge, nor a disadvantage or sign of inferiority of the human sciences
compared to the sciences of nature. Rather, it constitutes the condition of pos-
sibility of our knowledge of the human, and it is a structure perfectly appropri-
ate to its object.
But this last point brings us to Heidegger’s true contribution to the theory of
interpretation, which is not limited to a more precise description of the act of
understanding but radically changes its status. Hermeneutical understanding is
appropriate to its object because its object is itself hermeneutical—that is, un-
derstanding belongs essentially to its being. For Heidegger understanding is not
merely one of our possible activities, it belongs to our mode of being. It pertains
to our understanding of the world because it belongs to our being-in-the-world.
In this hermeneutics ceases to be a merely epistemological concept and becomes
an ontological concept.
This means, for example, that our understanding of others, grasping the
meaning of their expressions, is a task that is not limited to the practice of the
human sciences but constitutes a dimension of our being, which Heidegger
calls (pp. 117ff.) being-with-others (Mitsein). But Heidegger’s ontologization
of hermeneutics goes even farther. Not only our relations with others, but even
our relations with ourselves, are characterized by hermeneutical understanding.
Dasein is a relation with itself (an echo of Kierkegaard), and this relation is one
of hermeneutical understanding. Self-understanding too has the structure of
“understanding in advance” which is the pre-given world, the horizon, or the
situation, which gives a prior significance to our actions and our projects. These
in turn influence and change the character of the pre-given mundane horizon.
Thus self-understanding resembles in its structure the relation of wholes to
parts—that is, the circularity found in the hermeneutical understanding of texts
and of the expressions of others. In this sense one can speak not merely of self-
understanding but of a self-interpretation (Selbstauslegung) which would be, as
in the case of interpreting texts, the discovery or revelation of meaning.
Clearly this self-understanding is in no way a matter of grasping an object,
myself, which possesses a meaning independently of the act of understanding.
For Dasein, self-understanding equals self-constitution. Thus the act or the activ-
ity of understanding is constitutive of its being.
Thus the notion of hermeneutics is transformed, at the hands of Heidegger,
from an epistemological to an ontological concept. To be sure, the epistemologi-
cal role of interpretation remains intact, and important, after this transforma-
tion, but Heidegger believes he has given it a foundation. Rooted in human exis-
tence, the interpretation of texts and other expressions in the human sciences is
secondary and derived, a special application, so to speak, of human ontology.
This transformation is explicitly acknowledged and presupposed in the two great
20th-century versions of hermeneutical philosophy, those of Gadamer (1965)
and Ricoeur (1987). Though they both return, each in his own way, to the prob-
lems of interpretation internal to the human sciences, they do it in full recogni-
tion of the ontological background of the hermeneutical activity they seek to
understand and describe. For both philosophers, the understanding of texts, of
other persons, of the past, is the exercise of a human capacity par excellence, a
capacity through which man understands but also transforms himself and his
world.
I have retraced this development of the concept of hermeneutics because
I see, as I indicated before, a certain parallel between hermeneutics and narrative
with regard to their philosophical status. Is it possible that narrative, as an episte-

mological function, is rooted in an ontological narrativity—that is, a narrativity
that is constitutive of human being in a sense comparable to hermeneutics?
First we should note that between hermeneutical understanding and narra-
tivity there is more than a simple parallel. We have already shown in what sense
narrative plays an epistemological role, at least in history, and in this sense it is
comparable to the epistemological role of hermeneutics. But there is more to it
than that. The former (narrative) can be seen as a species of the latter (herme-
neutics), perhaps even the most important species. If the act of understanding
consists in grasping the meaning of an expression, grasping the meaning of an
action, for example, as we said before, is to be able to “tell a story” in which this
action has a place; that is, to link this action with other actions in a “plot” in
which they all cohere. Once again it is a question of the relation between wholes
and parts.
Now if hermeneutical understanding has revealed itself as having its origins
in the understanding and indeed the constitution of self, and if narrativity is a
form of understanding, it becomes possible to conceive of self-constitution as
self-narration. This idea becomes even more plausible of we consider the tem-
poral character of understanding, a feature we have not mentioned so far but
one which is at the center of the Heideggerian transformation of epistemology
into ontology. As we know, Heidegger reinterprets all the ontological struc-
tures of Dasein into temporal structures. Concepts like Vor-griff, Vor-struktur,
sich vorweg, terms like “project” and “projection,” indicate a temporal “grasp-in-
advance” through which present and past are constituted from the point of
view of the future. Seen in this way, self-understanding exhibits in its very
structure what Paul Ricoeur calls the configuration of time, through an act
which contains all the essential elements of an act of narration. Acting con-
sciously, especially in the case of a project that involves a series of actions, on
the one hand, and telling the story of my action, or being able to tell it, either to
myself or to others, on the other hand, are not two different things, but are two
aspects, or perhaps just two descriptions, of one and the same process. Narra-
tion in this sense, like the understanding in general of which it is the concreti-
zation, does not exist independently of an action which precedes it but consti-
tutes the action. Action does not exist independently of its meaning, and it is
narration that gives it meaning by giving it its form and its internal and external
coherence.
Here, at the level of the constitution of actions and projects, the ontological
role of narration reveals itself as practical, the organization of praxis. But beyond
such projects, or rather through them, according to the Heideggerian analysis,
the agent, the subject of projects and complexes of projects, is also constituted.
We move from the plane of stories about actions to that of one’s life-story, of
autobiography, usually unwritten, through which we seek or construct for our-

selves a “coherence of life” (Zusammenhang des Lebens, as Dilthey calls it). This
tacit or implicit autobiography is constantly being composed and revised: “Re-
versals of fortune” make changes possible or necessary that are sometimes
sudden and profound—think, for example of certain religious or political con-
versions. Since it is not facts or events that are being changed but stories, the
changes affect the past and the present as well as the projected future. Once
again, one cannot cleanly separate the life from the activity of recounting the life.
Narrative is what Richard Wollheim (1985) calls the “thread of life” which at
any moment holds together past, present, and future against the threat of frag-
mentation, dissolution, and incoherence. To use Wittgenstein’s term (1964),
one can say that before being a form of discourse, narrative is a form of life
(Lebensform).
This idea of narration as self-constitution does not suggest that the subject
creates itself ex nihilo. In phenomenology, constitution is not creation. Even if
I am “entangled” in stories already under way, as Wilhelm Schapp (1976) puts it,
when I play roles established by society, it is still through these stories that I un-
derstand myself.
Up to now we have not spoken of history proper. The past which concerns
history is composed of individuals’ actions and of individual lives, but history is
primarily interested in society and deals with individuals only in their social
roles, whether as “great men/women” (leaders, royalty, political figures, etc.) or
as “ordinary people.” Our ontological theory of narrative applies to history only
insofar as it can cast light on the nature of society.
But in fact, society, or rather societies, groups, especially the ones we call com-
munities, are characterized by the same sort of self-constitution we have found in
individuals. A community is any group whose members recognize each other by
using the term “we,” be it a family, a professional association, a social class, an
ethnic or linguistic minority, up to and including the great modern nation-states.
Such a community constitutes itself as the (plural) subject of common actions
and experiences through the consciousness of a common past, present, and
future. But this consciousness is realized through the construction and repeated
revision of a narrative, a social autobiography, one could say, which unites the
three temporal dimensions into a unified story. This story is told by different in-
dividuals, of course, but always on behalf of the community. This social narrative
exists sometimes in the legends and tales which tell of the birth or foundation of
the society; it exists as well in the public discussion of current problems and of
the plans and projects proposed for solving them. Here again narrative reveals
itself as practical, as the organization of praxis. The narrative unity of the com-
munity is neither easy nor permanent; indeed, it can be fragile and vulnerable.
Thus, like the individual, the community always faces the possibility of its own
death, and it is against this possibility that the social narrative strives to hold to-
gether the diverse elements of the group and to prevent its fragmentation or
dissolution.
In this sense one can conceive of an ontological status for narrative at the com-
munity level. One can say that communities have a “narrative existence”—that is,
that they exist to the extent that they constitute themselves as narrative unities,
as subjects of a story. The narrative configuration of time and the self-constitu-
tion of the narrative subject are not something done in or by communities;
rather, it is what they are, it is their manner of being. Thus, as an ontological
concept, narrative is a way of characterizing not merely historical knowledge
but also the object of that knowledge—that is, historical reality or the res gestae
themselves.
In this way I respond to the question I asked at the outset: What must histori-
cal reality be like if it is to be influenced by the explicit narratives proposed by
historians? This reality must be, in its own way, a narrative reality, a reality that
exists in being told. This brings us to the other question I asked at the beginning:
What is the connection between what I have presented here and the theory of
Time and Narrative? There are some parallels and some resemblances: Paul
Ricoeur also speaks of the narrative identity of the subject of action (1985,
p. 354), of entities of “participating membership” which would be “quasi-per-
sons” or collective subjects (1983, p. 255). He even speaks of a “world of action
already configured by narrative activity, having a meaning prior to scientific his-
tory” (1983, p. 253). Still, I think there is a slight difference of perspective that is
worth underlining, such that my account constitutes, I hope, a useful comple-
ment to Ricoeur’s theory.
It is clear that the central preoccupation of that part of Time and Narrative
that deals with history is the status of historical knowledge, or perhaps of the
historical text. In magisterial fashion, Paul Ricoeur shows us how the discipline
of history transcends simple narration in becoming “scientific” yet maintains
the essential elements of narrative at a higher level. At the same time, as I’ve
shown, Ricoeur’s theory transcends conventional epistemology because the re-
lation between historical knowledge and the real past is not a relation of represen-
tation or of correspondence. The notions of triple mimesis, of the intersection
(entrecroisement) of history and fiction, convey the idea of historical knowledge
which is not a simple reflection of its object but which transforms its object by
refiguration, by creative reference. There is no doubt that this theory will trans-
form the epistemological approach that has typified the philosophy of history in
the analytic style, and it will have a decisive influence on philosophical reflec-
tions on French historiography.
At the same time it runs the risk, it seems to me, of neglecting or even distort-
ing the ontological aspects of narrativity to which I have called attention here.
The biographer, “configuring” the events of the life of another, is not the first to
constitute his subject by the act of narration. To be sure, he may refigure this life
by reinterpreting these events, and in certain cases it can be said that the biogra-
pher understands his subject better than the latter understands herself. This su-
perior understanding may be due to the advantage of hindsight—or the advan-
tage of theory in the case of psychotherapy. But the existence of this person and
this life derives from a first-order narrative through which the person constitutes
herself as a subject of actions, of experiences, and of a life.
In the same way, in history, the “constitution” deriving from the narrative ac-
tivity of the historian is preceded by the narrative self-constitution of social en-
tities. One may be tempted by a certain idealism, since some social entities seem
to have been created or invented by historical retrospection, e.g., certain classes
(medieval guilds, the modern bourgeoisie), certain events (the Industrial Revo-
lution), certain entities (Henri Pirenne’s Mediterranean empire). But even here,
it is a question of reinterpreting activities and events that had their original exis-
tence as a first-order narration at the level of the social group. It is of course pos-
sible that this existence was in turn influenced by a prior narration—that is, that
it was itself a refiguration based on a prior act of historical, political, or even
poetic narration. Thus historical reality, the social life of communities, can re-
ceive and take on narrative features suggested by its historians and its poets. But
this capacity to receive narratives presupposes a mode of existence that is already
narrative in character. It is in this sense that the concept of narrative must ulti-
mately be considered an ontological notion.
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INDEX
9/11 attacks, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64 being with others, 48–49
Berlin Wall, fall of, 54, 58, 61, 78, 139
action, 110, 111 and expectations, 59, 64
action, human, 88 and experience, 32
in Annales school, 112 as world historical event, 134
in the Enlightenment, 193 Blake, William, 10, 14, 18, 137
in G. W. F. Hegel, 91, 95 Bolshevik revolution, 98
in German philosophy, 158 Braudel, Fernand, 218, 219, 221
and history, 90, 107, 123 British empiricism, 5, 8, 11, 137
meaning of, 225 Buber, Martin, 23–25
and narrative, 195, 215, 221, 222, 223 I-Thou relation in, 48
vs. natural phenomena, 146 sense of experience in, 30
and the physical world, 209
space and time in, 184 characters, 211
in stories, 194 in fiction, 200, 206
action, social, 80 and phenomenology, 50
actions as events, 110 as point of view, 109, 111, 117
Adorno, Theodor W., 98 role in narrative, 118, 207
agent, role of, 111 Christianity, 86, 87, 93, 100, 144
Aktus, 137 and G. W. F. Hegel, 83, 99
Annales school, 112, 202, 218, 219 and Greek philosophy, 85
Aristotle, 109, 189, 203, 215 as historical phenomenon, 148
cyclical patterns in, 84 and time, 84
and experience, 8 cognitive instrument, 107, 112, 170, 225
phronesis, 37 Cold War, 101, 156, 191
audience, 60, 61 and events, 61, 62
Christian, 85 and perspective, 213
and fiction, 205, 206 commemoration, 55, 66, 181, 190
and intersubjectivity, 62 community, 49–52, 52–55
and meaning in history, 86 consciousness, 18, 23, 28, 225
as point of view, 109, 111, 113, 118 and action, 215
of political rhetoric, 133 and agency, 187
Augustine, 83, 132 of body, 39
and classical philosophy of history, 85 and community, 229
and evil, 100 in Edmund Husserl, 48, 72, 149, 150, 151, 159,
and meaning in history, 82 163
and metaphysical philosophy, 76 flow of, 26
and religion, 86, 87 and future, 36, 59
theology of history of, 88 in G. W. F. Hegel, 17
239
240 index
consciousness (continued) on positivism, 203

and history, 47 on reductionism, 160
and intentionality, 41, 160 on retrospection, 55, 58, 64
intersubjective dimension of, 161 on senses of experience, 65
in Jean-Paul Sartre, 169 on time-consciousness, 38
and meaning, 43
and memory, 34 end of history, 77, 223
of past, 33 and A. C. Danto, 103
and phenomenology, 138, 162, 194 and G. W. F. Hegel, 57, 132, 135, 144
and points of view, 195 and Karl Löwith, 140
of present, 35 and Karl Marx, 156
of psychic individuals, 22 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 169
and self-consciousness, 127 Engels, Friedrich, 97, 122, 123, 124
and theory of mind, 29 influence on Soviet Union, 98
of time, 147 and philosophy of history, 96
in Wilhelm Dilthey, 20 Enlightenment, the, 23, 88, 144, 182
consciousness, historical, 46 conception of history, 95, 142, 143, 202
consciousness, individual, 95, 126 on future, 140
consciousness, philosophical, 105 and G. W. F. Hegel, 94, 128
consciousness, time, 37, 38, 171, 175 ideas on history in, 91
constant conjunction, 13, 32 influence on G. W. F. Hegel, 100
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental influence on German philosophy, 89
Phenomenology, 151–153 on reason, 155
phenomenology and historicity in, 159–167 on religion, 156, 193
and Voltaire, 87
Danto, Arthur C., 2, 109, 114, 115, 194, 223, 225 epistemology, 157–159, 223–231
and analytic philosophy of history, 78, 170 Erfahrung, 126
on classical philosophy of history, 103 in Edmund Husserl, 21, 22, 42
and historical narrative, 107 vs. Erlebnis, 31, 41
and metaphysics of everyday life, 105–108, 111, in G. W. F. Hegel, 59
112, 121, 134 in Immanuel Kant, 8, 15, 16, 17, 19, 137
and metaphysics of history, 74, 81 in John Dewey, 25
on philosophy of history, 102 as maturation, 18
and realism, 197 sense of, 20, 26, 30
and retrospection, 56, 57, 58, 64, 196 in Walter Benjamin, 23
and story-telling, 195 Erlebnis, 19–23, 37
version of narrative of, 111 in Edmund Husserl, 26, 28, 32, 36, 39
Derrida, Jacques, 66 vs. Erfahrung, 8, 31, 41
Dewey, John, 23–25, 32, 49, 137 in John Dewey, 25
dialectical version of experience in, 30 sense of, 30
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 57, 229 events, 42–43
and Edmund Husserl, 146–147, 149, 166 events, historical, 6, 47, 63, 65, 70
on Erlebnisse, 19–23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 36 and Christianity, 84
on experience, 32 and classical philosophy of history, 80, 114
on flow of time, 35 destiny of, 88
and foundationalism, 41 experience of, 58–60
on G. W. F. Hegel, 95, 142 Fernand Braudel on, 221
and Geisteswissenschaften, 216 and fiction, 200
on Geisteswissenschaften vs. and historians, 189
Naturwissenschaften, 74 and human participation, 139
on hermeneutics, 226 levels of, 134
on historical beings, 66, 71, 161, 162 and meaning, 99, 102
on historical knowledge, 158 Niall Ferguson on, 191
historical relativism in, 165 and past events, 56
on historicity, 47, 154, 169 relation of, 201
on narrative, 223 and subjectivity, 202
on philosophy of history, 96 temporality of, 62
index 241
existence, historical, 52, 54 Gallie, W. B., 2, 107, 170, 225

existence, social, 1, 4 Geisteswissenschaften, 162, 164, 226
and action, 118 definition of, 146
and collective subject, 50 epistemology of, 159
in Edmund Husserl, 167 vs. Naturwissenschaften, 74, 107, 158
and interpretation, 146 and Wilhelm Dilthey, 160, 216
in Jean-Paul Sartre, 169 German historicism, 141, 171
and narrative, 220 emergence of, 142–145
and social phenomena, 117 and Marxism, 145–146
and temporality, 45 grand récit, 77
and time, 52, 133 Greeks philosophy, 183, 184, 188
experience, 67 Edmund Husserl on, 152, 154, 165, 171
ambiguity of, 9 and evil, 100
concepts of, 18–19, 25–26, 29–30 and freedom, 93, 144
cumulative sense of, 30 historical phenomena in, 143
dialectical aspect of, 32 and phenomenological reduction, 46
as focus of a philosophy of history, 2–5 and reality vs. appearance, 155
foundational role for, 31 and religion, 86
and foundationalism, 26–29 and techne, 140
and historicity, 47 and time, 84, 85
and history, 62–64 worldview of, 181
and innocence, 10–15
intentionality of, 65 Halbwachs, Maurice, 3
and memory, 71–73 Handlung, 137
narrative of, 106 Hegel, G. W. F., 77, 83–91, 134, 136, 153, 170
and phenomenological approach, 5 and Christianity, 99
practical sense of, 80 compared with Karl Marx, 97
and practice, 80, 136 concept of experience in, 137
relation to practice, 136–140 dialectical version of experience in, 30
senses of, 31–33 difference from Edmund Husserl, 166
temporality of, 18, 33, 36, 45, 54, 60, 63, 77, 138 and emergence of historicism, 141
as term, 9, 10, 29 on Erfahrung, 8, 22, 25, 59
and time, 36–38 on experience, 15–18, 30, 32, 139
varieties of, 8–10 on freedom, 144
experience, direct, 47, 58 and French phenomenology, 168
and nature, 46 on Geist, 69, 126, 129
relation to the past of, 170 on historical diversity, 145
and social world, 171 and historicization of philosophy, 143
and television, 59 on independent existence, 127
untruth of, 64 influence on Edmund Husserl, 146, 154
experience, everyday, 80 influence on Karl Marx, 98
experience, historical, 5, 6, 173, 199 influence on Wilhelm Dilthey, 20
on in-itself-for-itself, 156, 165
falsehood, 205–206 Karl Löwith on, 140
Fay, Brian, 2 lectures of, 6, 91–97, 124–125
Ferdinand, Archduke, assassination of, 57, 102, on link between truth and retrospection, 57
214 metaphysical concepts in, 80
fiction, 200–204, 205–206 and metaphysics of history, 74, 76, 79
foundationalism, 26–29 phenomenology of, 50
Frankfurt School, 98, 99 and philosophy of history, 78, 82, 103, 104, 108,
French Revolution, 57, 94, 102, 130, 224 115, 132, 133, 142, 147, 155, 172
and G. W. F. Hegel, 88, 99, 143, 155 as precursor to Karl Marx, 101
and social class, 122 reason and faith in, 13
as social event, 116 as reformer, 130–132
Freud, Sigmund, 66 on relativism, 149
Fukuyama, Francis, 57, 104, 135, 136 on retrospection, 64
and end of history, 78, 79, 82, 134 secularization of, 100
242 index
Hegel, G. W. F. (continued) on Erlebnisse, 19–23, 25, 28, 30, 32

on senses of experience, 33, 65 on experience, 37
on social and human relations, 128 on foundationalism, 41
spirit of a people in, 117 on Geschichte, 161
on struggle for recognition, 135 on historicity, 47, 48, 163, 169, 172
trial-and-error sense of experience in, 19, 24 on history of philosophy, 82, 165
view of the social world of, 169 influence of G. W. F. Hegel on, 168
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 87, 88, 89, 117, 142, influence on Martin Heidegger on, 29
143 on intentionality, 40
historicism, 141, 152, 153, 167 lectures of, 171
definition of, 101 and lived vs. objective space, 173, 174, 183
and Edmund Husserl, 147–151 Paul Ricoeur on, 170
and Marxism, 145–146 on phenomenology, 8, 141, 142, 159, 166, 167
historicism, German, 142–145, 171 on phenomenology of space, 177
historicity, 77, 133, 134, 136, 171 and philosophy of history, 153–157
and being with others, 65 on reductionism, 158
community and, 52–55 response to historicism, 147–151
in Crisis, 159–167 and retention vs. recollection, 71
Edmund Husserl on, 152, 153, 154 retention-protention scheme in, 38, 39, 42, 65,
experience and, 6, 47, 172 138, 139, 160, 175, 179
Martin Heidegger on, 38, 48 and science, 49
and Marxism, 169 on temporality, 33–36
and social beings, 75 and temporality of experience, 60
and social temporality, 139 on transcendental consciousness, 162
and time, 181 use of phenomenological reduction, 46
historiography, 66 and Wilhelm Dilthey, 146–147
history, 1, 5, 6, 56 and Wissenschaft, 164
epistemology of, 68, 74, 75–76, 154, 157–159 Hyppolite, Jean, 98, 168
and experience, 62–64
and fiction, 200–204 imagination, 206–207
and French phenomenology, 167–171 innocence, 32
meaning of, 76 and experience, 10–14, 18
metaphysics of, 76–77 vs. experience, 19
and phenomenology, 171–172 and experience, 26, 137
phenomenology of, 10, 74, 77, 141, 171 in John Locke, 30
and retrospection, 55–58 return to, 11, 24, 25, 136, 165
theology of, 86, 87, 88, 99, 140 intentionality, 63, 161, 190
history, narrative, 112, 193, 202, 219 of agent, 187
history, speculative philosophy of, 78, 79, 82, 132, of consciousness, 160
155 in Edmund Husserl, 141, 158, 159, 162, 177
definition of, 83 and experience, 43, 47, 65, 72
metaphysical claims of, 81 in G. W. F. Hegel, 69
history, virtual, 191–193 and meaning in history, 76–77
Holocaust, the, 66, 100 in phenomenology, 38–42
Horkheimer, Max, 98 intersubjectivity, 48, 49, 60, 62, 71
Hume, David, 47, 65, 89, 137, 139 in Edmund Husserl, 141, 151, 160, 161, 167,
and cause and effect, 44 177
experience in, 32, 33
on habit, 37 Jakobson, Roman, 108
and human knowledge, 11 James, William, 23–25, 30
on impressions and experience, 30, 35 Jay, Martin, 9, 10, 23, 25, 137
and purpose of philosophy, 12
Husserl, Edmund, 5, 6, 44, 56, 146–147 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 152
on concept of world, 43 and Erfahrung, 8, 19, 22, 25, 30, 42
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental on experience, 15–18, 24, 32, 65
Phenomenology, 151–153 and foundation for knowledge, 26
and diagram of time, 176 and foundational role of sensation, 27
on Erfahrung, 26 on history, 90, 133
index 243
on hope, 91 as philosopher, 98
influence on Edmund Husserl, 146, 156, 163 and philosophy of history, 104, 108
influence on G. W. F. Hegel, 89 political movement of, 98
influence on German philosophy, 131, 142, 158 Marxism, 97, 98, 156, 182
influence on philosophy of history, 140 and 19th-century German historicism, 145–146
influence on Wilhelm Dilthey, 20 of 20th-century British historians, 58
influenced by Enlightenment, 143 Friedrich Engels on, 96
on knowledge, 206 Jean-Paul Sartre on, 170
on limits of human knowledge, 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty on, 169
on metaphysics, 29 Marxists, 101, 122–124
as Protestant, 94 memory, 2–5, 33, 67, 71–73
on psychology vs. epistemology, 159 memory, collective, 3, 73, 76
on receptivity vs. spontaneity, 92, 137 metaphysics, positivist, 208, 211
and religion of morality, 130 Mink, Louis, 2, 70, 204
on sublime, 31 and analytic philosophy of history, 170
on theology, 95 and historical narrative, 68, 107, 112, 201, 203,
on transcendental consciousness, 162 225
on transcendental idealism, 151 mode of comprehension, 107, 112, 225
transcendental philosophy of, 77 modernity, 25, 31, 144, 183
knowledge, 206–207 monuments, 55, 66, 75, 119
knowledge, empirical, 30 mysticism, 23–25
Kojève, Alexandre, 98, 168
narrative, 193–195
language, 2 in Arthur C. Danto, 105, 106
life, everyday, 23, 114, 116, 185, 187, 220 as causal explanation, 107
metaphysics of, 105–107, 111, 121, 134 and classical philosophy of history, 114–116
and narrative, 108–113 and everyday life, 108–113
linguistic turn, 2, 3, 5, 9, 26, 27, 68 in French structuralist literary theory, 108
literary theory, 107, 108, 170 in literary theory, 107
literary theory, French structuralist, 108 ontology of, 223–231
Locke, John, 12, 13, 14, 15, 43 and practice, 106
on experience, 8, 11, 18, 20, 25, 32 and reality, 207–211
on rationalism, 10 role in history, 2, 4
on relation to world, 65 narrative, practical, 113–114
on sensation, 26, 30, 41 narrative representation, 67–71
sense-impressions in, 16, 24 narrative structure, 113, 114, 118, 121, 122
white paper of, 10, 137, 138 levels of, 136
Löwith, Karl, 81, 140, 157 as metaphysics of everyday life, 110
and Christianity, 100 as a priori cultural form, 112
on classical philosophy of history, 103, 105, 115 and real world, 222
Meaning in History, 99 use by those in power, 220
on philosophy of history, 74, 87, 101, 102 narrative theory, 109, 195
narratology, 108, 211
Marcuse, Herbert, 98 narrator, 70, 109, 110, 111, 118, 218
Marx, Karl, 154, 170 Naturwissenschaften, 74, 107
A. C. Danto on, 103 neo-Kantians, 74, 147, 158, 203, 216
on class, 117 neo-positivism, 24, 26, 202
and classical philosophy of history, 96, 99, 115,
140 objects, 42–43
and crisis, 156 other, the, 178–180
and G. W. F. Hegel, 97, 101, 128, 132, 133, 142 others, 187–188
and historicism, 145–146
influence on French philosophy, 168, 169 passivity, 14, 17, 19, 36, 138
and Karl Löwith, 70, 100 and Erfahrung, 25
and Marxists, 122–124 and experience, 72, 137
and meaning in history, 82 and real world, 28
and metaphysical philosophy of history, 76 past, 33, 34, 229
244 index
Patocka, Jan, 171 and historical narrative, 225

personal life-story, 61, 63, 113, 114, 119, 228 and metaphysics, 211
phenomenology, 5, 141 and natural science, 203
definition of, 1 and social science, 220
and epistemology of history, 157–159 and unity-of-science, 107
and history, 171–172 positivism, Comptean, 154
phenomenology, French, 167–171 practice, 80, 106, 136, 136–140
phenomenology of spirit, 124–130 practice, social, 80
philosophy of history, 74–75 pragmatism, 23–25
linked to concept of experience, 65 prediction, 92, 97, 102, 134, 140, 207, 222
and phenomenology of spirit, 124–130 prediction, false, 132
representation in, 31 prediction, historical, 101
as secularized version of the salvation story, 100 present, 33, 34, 35
philosophy of history, analytic, 74, 105, 106, 107, presidential election of 2008, 54, 58, 62, 64, 139
212, 225 prophecy, 89, 92, 101, 140
A. C. Danto on, 78 Propp, Vladimir, 108
narrative in, 106, 107
and William Dray, 79 reality, 207–211
philosophy of history, classical, 78–80, 80–82, 105, reality, historical, 66
117 receptivity vs. spontaneity, 92, 137
and Augustine, 85 representation, 2–5, 67
critiques of, 102 representation, linguistic, 2, 3, 31, 67
and G. W. F. Hegel, 83, 132, 133 retrospection, 55–58
Hayden White on, 112 Ricoeur, Paul, 167, 170, 175, 199, 209
and historicity, 136 and configuration of time, 228
Karl Löwith on, 100, 103 hermeneutical philosophy of, 227
and Karl Marx, 96, 98 and historicity, 47
and narrative, 106, 114–116, 121 on history and fiction, 200–201
post-World War II, 99 influence on Hayden White, 220
and secularization thesis, 99 and memory approach to history, 3
theories of, 121–122 on narrative, 114, 203, 223, 225, 230
philosophy of history, substantive, 6, 102, 105, and phenomenology, 171
154, 156, 157, 161 and philosophy of history, 224
sense of meaning in, 103
philosophy of mind, 26, 28, 32 science, 107
philosophy of science, 26, 49, 75, 81, 101, 104, 153 secularization thesis, 99
place, 185–187 sense-experience, 18, 32, 41
Plato, 8, 11, 84, 86, 146, 151 sociality, 7, 171
plotting, 111 space, 173–174
point of view, 111, 177, 179, 180, 195 space, cultural, 173, 174, 175, 183
of agent, 69, 117, 189, 190, 193, 194, 196, 213, space, lived, 173, 175–176
216 space, objective, 174, 176, 178, 183
first person, 50 vs. lived space, 173
of future, 228 Spengler, Oswald, 76, 82, 104
of historian, 191, 192, 197 Stalin, Joseph, 99
intentionality as, 161 story, 109
of narrator, 218 story-teller, 109, 111
of phenomenological account of time, 43 viewpoint of, 113
story-teller, protagonist, and audience as voice of authority, 109
combined, 113 story-telling, 69, 121, 223
and time, 178 and action, 117
points of view, historical, 183–198 vs. causal explanation, 204
Popper, Karl, 74, 101, 102, 103, 105, 137 as discourse, 124
positivism, 95, 155, 158, 201, 204, 207, 216 and fiction, 115, 220
and conception of science, 137 in leadership, 119
and David Hume, 27 and narration, 105, 108
and epistemology of history, 68 and narrative, 112, 203, 215
index 245
and points of view, 111 and passivity, 138

roles in, 118 phenomenological description of, 36
rules of, 222 and philosophy of history, 33
structuralists, 111, 112, 205, 211 protentional-retentional, 73
theories of language, 170 and social world, 42, 45
theories of narrative, 220 theodicy, 85, 92, 94, 100, 103, 115
subject, collective, 50, 51, 63, 117, 230 and G. W. F. Hegel, 89
subject, social, 65, 143 and meaning, 77
subject, universal, 63, 64, 124 and philosophy of history, 87
sublime, 5, 32 time, 36–38, 178–180, 188–191
as term, 31 time, cultural, 165, 173–181, 182–183
time, lived, 175–176
temporal configurations, 109, 110, 113 time, local, 180–182
temporality, 59 Toynbee, Arnold J., 76, 79, 82, 104
of community, 53, 141, 180 turning points, 77, 106, 107, 120, 134, 156
Edmund Husserl on, 160, 167 events as, 56, 63
and experience of the social world, 1 in narrative theory, 109
features of, 136
of historical existence, 54 unity-of-science program, 107, 217, 221
in historicity, 171, 181 universal now, 176–178
levels of, 6, 60–62
of narrative, 170 Voltaire, 87, 99
of Natur and Geist, 158
Paul Ricoeur on, 223 White, Hayden, 2, 4, 68, 108, 115, 201, 220
phenomenological account of, 38, 39, 40, 46, on history, 112
47, 66 and history vs. fiction, 200
of practical-social world, 80 Wissenschaft, 99, 155, 157, 164, 202
and recurrent time, 182 world, 42–43
of subject, 52 world, contemporary, 182–183
temporality, historical, 65 world, human, 43–47
temporality, human, 61, 134 world, social, 80, 140, 169, 171
temporality of experience, 18, 65, 77, 161 and experience, 1, 44
and Erfahrung, 17 and history, 43
and historical character of experience, 60 and temporality, 45, 46
and historical time, 63 World War I, 23, 57, 98, 157, 166
of history, 139 World War II, 26, 27, 61, 74, 82, 99, 103
and memory, 14 writing, historical, 32, 69, 220, 225

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Experience and History

Experience and History

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Introduction: On the Phenomenology of History 1

I. The Varieties of Experience 8

II. Experience and History 31

III. Experience and the Philosophy of History 65

IV. The Metaphysics of History and Its Critics 78

V. A Phenomenological Rereading of the Classical Philosophy

VI. Phenomenologists on History 141

VII. Space, Time, and History 173

VIII. Experience, Narrative, and Historical Knowledge 199

3. EPISTEMOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY OF NARRATIVE 223

1. The Phenomenological Question

2. Representation, Memory, Experience

Memory has served very differently as a focus for philosophical reflection on

(the traditional paradigm for representational theories of language). The pri-

It is against this background that a phenomenological approach, based on the

3. Phenomenological Perspectives: An Outline

a more direct phenomenological approach and takes up important themes that

The Varieties of Experience

1. On the Concept of Experience and Its Curious Fate

be exhaustive—this is one way in which my project differs from Jay’s—for the

2. Experience and Innocence: The Empiricists

impinging directly on the skin. As we said before, experience puts us directly in

The nature of experience is this. We remember to have had frequent

that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended

The temporality and complexity of experience in this sense, especially the

3. Experience in Kant and Hegel

described by Hume. Causality is disposed of in two sentences by referring to

4. So Far: Three Concepts of Experience

5. Dilthey, Husserl, and a New Word: Erlebnis

“events” (Vorkommnisse, Ereignisse) which, “changing from moment to moment,

6. From Mysticism to Pragmatism: Buber, James, Dewey

sense-data theory (see pp. 16f.). Likewise the Diltheyan–Husserlian notion of

7. Taking Stock Again: How Many Concepts of Experience?

8. Experience and Foundationalism

introduced by Wittgenstein (1964)–the idea of different games, of rules and

one—simplicity, directness, passivity—experiences which seem to or, more

“grounding,” etc. Both are interested is questions of evidence, verification, and

9. Summing Up: Four Concepts of Experience

1. The “innocence” of Locke’s sensations, Hume’s impressions, and Kant’s first

Experience and History

1. The Two Relevant Senses of Experience

of experience is to come about, any present experience must involve an aware-

3. Time and Experience

We have drawn on Husserl’s account of time-consciousness as a way of

account, namely retention–protention and the temporal Gestalt. But Husserl

wrong to say that it had no object. So if a “relation” is defined as something that

5. Objects, Events, World

say that the experience, of the here-and-now, is intentionally related to things

6. Others and the Human World

directly experienced, but it can also be understood as the specific environment

7. Experience and Historicity

8. Being with Others

9. “We” and the Community

V. A Phenomenological Rereading of the Classical Philosophy

c ommemoration and memorialization, in which we celebrate our heroes and