The Concept of History

GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL As Pinkard concludes, even though justice and freedom have very rarely been front and center in the “restless succession” of human history, nonetheless, as components of a conflicted striving for collective self-comprehension and thus for recognition, they have emerged as what the struggles have all been about. (168; emphasis added) Yet, if technological and scientific developments, not to mention a vast number of other contingent developments, are central to opening up subjectivity as a question, why should self-determination then be idealistically recast as the final meaning of those developments? If, on the contrary, we stay with the accounts Hegel gives in the Phenomenology and Lectures on the Philosophy of History, where all we have is a retrospective narrative anchored in “determinate negation,” although we lose Hegel’s own claims about self-determining subjectivity as outside of “the temporal river” (163), perhaps those are claims that we should give back to the idealist view of history. This gesture would make way, instead, for an account that would require us to think in terms of narrative construction and an ethics of re-inheriting the past. Anna Katsman The New School for Social Research Dmitri Nikulin, The Concept of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Of the many accomplishments of Nikulin’s new book, three stand out as deserving mention at the outset: (1) the defense it provides for a robust and unique understanding of historical realism; (2) the pluralist and existential interpretation of history and human agency it puts forward; and most importantly, (3) the genealogical-archaeological method of investigation it utilizes to study the historical development of how we conceive of history. Taken together, these three features serve as the building blocks from which Nikulin constructs his powerful intervention into current debates regarding the nature and composition of history. To outline this important work, I will unpack each feature and its relation to the others. While standard methodological approaches to the philosophy of history are preoccupied with providing a metaphysical account of the nature of history as such, Nikulin opts instead to undertake a genealogical investigation to unearth the myriad originating moments that have contributed to the creation of our contemporary practice of recording history (25). Noting the influence of both Nietzsche’s genealogical study of the imbrication of values, practices, and history, and Foucault’s genealogical-archaeological 288 BOOK REVIEWS survey of regimes of power and identity-construction (151–9), Nikulin presents us with a unique exploration of the historical genesis of our concept of history itself. That is to say, instead of providing a traditional philosophy of history that trades upon secularized theological notions of unity, teleology, and purposiveness (see 18–20), Nikulin presents the reader with a study of the genesis of our sense of history—as a formal discipline of critical inquiry, as a specific domain of knowledge, and as a specialized practice of prose-writing. Through the process of this excavation of the originating moments of the “movement of events” (xi), the bulk of Nikulin’s text is spent showing how history as a practice came into existence over time, growing out of, and then differentiating itself from, a confluence of different practices that preceded it. These practices include epic poetry, familial genealogies, geographical records, fable-myth traditions, individual travelogues, the varied use of catalogues, and other practices of antiquarianism, epithets, and anecdotes. Studying the different genealogical relations between these practices and the practice of writing history as we know it today, Nikulin is able to demonstrate with scholarly precision how history came to be through assimilating particular features of these practices while simultaneously distinguishing itself from these same practices by leaving behind or altering other features (see chaps. 3 and 5). By charting history genealogically, Nikulin also establishes the platform from which he critically engages with a panoply of other approaches to philosophy of history in chapter 6: the Annales School, the “Memory School,” the work of Hayden White, and the writings of Hegel, Marx, and Collingwood, among others. Agreeing with aspects of each of these approaches, Nikulin is able to demonstrate the variety of ways in which the accounts and methods of recording history do in fact share certain features with other discursive practices, while also demonstrating to the reader how history’s use of these features is distinctive. For example, we see how history can be said to be like literature in some respects—such as in its use of narrative form (3)—while also being distinct from literature in other important respects—such as how historians operate under the requirement of constructing veridical judgments (8). Out of the numerous features that Nikulin considers to be elements that help to distinguish historical writing from other forms, four features in particular stand out—list, fabula, λόγος, and truth-telling. It is possible, Nikulin argues, to extract from all historical accounts a more simplified list or catalogue that represents the basic facts, events, acts, agents, and states of affairs that comprise the content around which a specific narrative is crafted (155). As a list, these elements form a series of enumerated items, each of which exists independently of the relations that a given narrative creates around and between them (156). 289 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL According to Nikulin, the fabula represents the narrative element that descriptively weaves together a specific account by organizing the items listed into an illustrative story (156–8). These fabulæ are open to interpretation (and reinterpretation) (ibid.), and they are public because they belong to nobody in particular. Fabulæ, for Nikulin, form the backbone of the written and oral traditions that define a community (see, e.g., 160–1). In chapter 5, Nikulin argues that λόγος is the principle or logic by which a given list is ordered. Λόγος is the basis on which items are recognized, selected, ordered, arranged, and classified in a list (99–102). The logic of a list is the generative or formative principle of that list and thus helps to establish the meaning of a particular history. The historian serves as both a witness to, and a judge of, history, and she is tasked in particular with judging what is to be included or excluded from a given historical account out of the total set of things witnessed (56). So, while on the one hand the historian’s role is to observe and collect—accumulating accounts, stories, artifacts, etc.—, on the other hand, she must critically discriminate among the items collected in order to create an account that is factually accurate and representative of the past as such (37). Nikulin refers to this as the principle of “truth-telling” (39), and he claims that it represents a defining feature that helped make history a novel discipline vis-à-vis literature, poetry, and other discourses that preceded its existence. According to Nikulin, agents strive for self-preservation in the face of their approaching death and the “non-being of oblivion” (29) by trying to secure a place for themselves within the record of the historical (2). In this regard, he considers the example of Herostratus, who burned down the temple of Artemis in an effort to be remembered (110–3). This drive for preservation against death, Nikulin argues, first manifests in writing in epic poetry, which records the drive within individuals to achieve, through great feats of effort, what is referred to as κλέος (fame, repute, glory, or even notoriety) (39–42). So it is that we find epic poetry and variants of “hero-literature” present us with early prototypes of history, representing the motivating nexus driving human beings toward the creation and maintenance of historical records. Epic poetry predates history proper, yet Nikulin claims that it imbues a certain quality upon all subsequent forms of historical writing (90). Nikulin further refines this existentialist backdrop in the process of outlining his pluralist conception of history. Working against the predominant secularized-theological accounts of history, Nikulin argues that individuals construct history through their actions, implying that the historical needs to be understood as coming into existence through the nexus of projects, ends, and purposes that humans take up and enact (166). Thus, for Nikulin, history is not a congealed product of a “master 290 BOOK REVIEWS narrative”; it is the haphazard and manifold result of all agents acting in the world over time to produce “variegated fabulæ” (10). In this manner, Nikulin transforms our sense of history itself, moving us away from a conception of history as something that tracks a singular process that is woven into the fabric of the natural and social world, and toward a pluralist understanding of history. It then follows that “history” becomes synonymous with the plurality of different “histories,” so much so that any state of affairs, according to Nikulin, will always remain open to the possibility of being re-encoded within multiple competing historical narratives (6). Looking at all of this from another angle, Nikulin describes to us how each individual needs to be understood as carrying multiple different histories within themselves at any given moment, where “history” takes on a unique meaning according to the subject position of the individual. Thus, the multiplicity of historical narratives that a given individual recognizes as formative of their particular self or world-understanding is said to result from the particular projects, familial relations, professional occupations, national origins, hobbies, etc., that the individual takes up and pursues (ibid.). This, of course, renders a singular ruling description of the substance and nature of history impossible—history has no universal goals and there is no singular movement to history. There is an open-ended plurality of different histories, and taken collectively, one could most accurately say that “history” is comprised of the loose conjunction of multiple “histories” (ibid.). Nikulin’s book is a remarkable effort of scholarship. He presents a compelling argument for how the very conception of history with which we operate is itself a historical product that emerged as a practice through a process of assimilation and differentiation from other practices and forms of discourse. Through this genealogical-archaeological story, unfolded as a complex and persuasive account of the concept of history, we are able to get “behind” history in some sense. Thus even if one disagrees with the conclusions the author reaches, it is hard to see how anyone could write about the philosophy of history without somehow acknowledging and confronting the conceptual advancements this book sets forth. Daniel Wagnon The New School for Social Research 291