Theme Issue 50

Historical Distance: Reflections on a Metaphor

Edited by Jaap den Hollander, Herman Paul, and Rik Peters

Cover image: art installation at World’s End park, photograph by Kelly Sikkema (6 April 2018)

+ JAAP DEN HOLLANDER, HERMAN PAUL, and RIK PETERS, Introduction The Metaphor of Historical Distance, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 1-10.

What does “historical distance” mean? Starting with Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch historian who refused to lecture on contemporary history, this introductory article argues that “historical distance” is a metaphor used in a variety of intellectual contexts. Accordingly, the metaphor has ontological, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, as well as methodological connotations. This implies that historical distance cannot be reduced to a single “problem” or “concept.” At the same time, this wide variety of meanings associated with distance helps explain why an easily recognizable tradition of scholarly reflection on historical distance does not exist. In a broad survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical theory, this article nonetheless attempts to show that distance has been a major, if seldom explicitly articulated, theme in European and American philosophy of history. In doing so, it pays special attention to those few authors who in recent years have taken up the metaphor for critical study. Finally, the paper summarizes some of the main arguments put forward in the articles comprising this issue on historical distance.

+ MARK SALBER PHILLIPS, Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 11-23.

In common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached observation made possible by the passage of time. Understood in these terms, distance has long been regarded as essential to modern historical practice, but this conception narrows the idea of distance and burdens it with a regulatory purpose. I argue that distance needs to be reconceived in terms of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far. Re-imagined in these terms, distance sheds its prescriptiveness and becomes a valuable heuristic for examining the history of historical representation. When distance is studied in relation to the range of mediations entailed in historical representation, it becomes evident that the plasticities of distance/proximity are by no means limited to gradients of time; rather, temporality is bound up with other distances that come from our need to engage with the historical past as (simultaneously) a realm of making, of feeling, of doing, and of understanding. Thus for every historical work, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: 1. the genres, media, and vocabularies that shape the history’s formal structures of representation; 2. the affective claims made by the historical account, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds; 3. the work’s implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; and 4. the modes of understanding on which the history’s intelligibility depends. These overlapping, but distinctive, distances—formal, affective, ideological, and conceptual—provide an analytic framework for examining changing modes of historical representation.

+ MARK BEVIR, Why Historical Distance is not a Problem, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 24-37 (December 2010), 28-46.

This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear with postfoundationalism. The developmental historicism of the nineteenth century appealed to narrative principles to establish continuity between past and present and to guide selections among facts. In the twentieth century, modernist historicists rejected such principles, thereby raising the specter of historical distance: that is, the distorting effects of the present on accounts of the past, the chasm between facts and narrative. The modernist problem became: how can historians avoid anachronism and develop accurate representations of the past? Instead of using narrative principles to select facts, modernist historicists appealed to atomized facts to validate narratives. However, in the late twentieth century, postmodernists (Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White) argued that there was no way to close the distance between facts and narratives. The postmodern problem became: how should historians conceive of their writing given the ineluctable distance between facts and narratives? Today, postfoundationalism dispels both modernist and postmodernist concerns with historical distance; it implies that all concepts (not just historical ones) fuse fact and theory, and it dissolves issues of conceptual relativism, textual meaning, and re-enactment.

+ HANS KELLNER, Beyond the Horizon: Chronoschisms and Historical Distance, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 38-50.

Historical distance presents more complex issues than simply evaluating the meaning of the temporal span between a point in the past and some moment present to an observer. The ordinary historical difference, which is horizontal in the sense that it evokes the notion of hermeneutic horizons, fragments uncontrollably when examined closely, resulting in what might be called a “chronoschism.” The experience of encountering a historical painting by Botticelli provides an example of this fragmentation. This complication of historical distance reminds us also of quite different sorts of distance, including the depths of endless regression, and the elevation of the historical sublime. These various forms of historical distance present a challenge to the horizontal character of normal historical practice.

+ JAAP DEN HOLLANDER, Contemporary History and the Art of Self-Distancing, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 51-67.

The metaphor of historical distance often appears in discussions about the study of contemporary history. It suggests that we cannot see the past in perspective if we are too near to it. According to founding fathers like Ranke and Humboldt, temporal distance is required to discern historical “ideas” or forms. The argument may have some plausibility, but the presupposition is plainly false, since we cannot see the past at all. This leaves us with the question of what to make of the so-called historical forms. This article discusses three different views. The first, historicist, view is objectivist and localizes historical forms in the past. The second, narrativist, view is subjectivist and localizes historical forms in the realm of imagination and representation. The third view goes beyond the other two in that it considers both sides. It does not use a one-sided but a two-sided concept of form, which hinges on the idea of a distinction. This means that historical forms occupy both sides of the subject–object distinction or the present–past distinction. Because the subject–object terminology is confusing, the essay employs an alternative distinction between first- and second-order observation. With the help of this distinction, it is possible to redescribe the distance metaphor in such a way that the theoretical status of contemporary history becomes less enigmatic.

+ EUGEN ZELEŇÁK, Indirect Reference and the Creation of Distance in History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 68-80.

In his discussion of David Hume and historical distance, Mark Salber Phillips points out that in the process of distance-creation there is a distinction between something occurring “within the text” and “outside the text.” In this paper I draw on this distinction and introduce a semantic mechanism (namely, meaning) that allows a certain distance to be designed within a historical text. This mechanism is highlighted in a view of reference that sees it as indirect (in distinction from a view of reference that sees it as direct and that has no room for the notion of meaning). According to the indirect reference view, meaning opens up a space for what might be called historical distance. However, this is not to say that everything with regard to the immediacy and remoteness of this historical distance is analyzable solely in terms of what is happening at the level of the text. In fact, I argue that distance-effects can be understood only if we also take into account contexts of the writing and reading of history. The semantics of indirect reference allows for distance-construction, but its span depends on the circumstances governing the creation and reception of historical representation. I conclude with the observation that the view presented here should not be interpreted as disconnecting historical work from past reality.

+ CHINATSU KOBAYASHI and MATHIEU MARION, Gadamer and Collingwood on Temporal Distance and Understanding, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 81-103.

In this paper, we begin by suggesting an intuitive model of time embodying a notion of temporal distance that we claim is at work in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, while it is rejected in Collingwood’s theory of interpretation. To show this, after a brief review of the influence of Collingwood on Gadamer and of their disagreement over the possibility of recovering an author’s intention, we examine in turn their answers to the problem of transposition, upon which the philosophy of Dilthey supposedly foundered. We show that Gadamer embraced the idea of temporal distance in his solution, which consisted in claiming that the distance between an author from the past and us is filled in by tradition, which opens access to the text for us, while Collingwood considered explanations of the actions of historical agents, and by extension understanding of a text, in intentional or rational terms. Furthermore, he thought that such explanations are not causal, and that the thoughts involved in them do not stand within the flow of physical time, which is involved in any notion of temporal distance. This is why Collingwood felt entitled to anti-relativistic conclusions about the recovery of authorial intentions, conclusions that prompted Gadamer to claim that “the dimension of hermeneutical mediation which is passed through in every act of understanding” escaped him. We then discuss the underlying notions of time at work in both Gadamer and Collingwood, showing that Ricœur had a better appreciation of the issue, since he saw that Collingwood’s moves parallel, up to a point, Heidegger’s critique of “vulgar time,” albeit with an entirely different result. We also point to the importance in Collingwood’s thinking of his notion of “incapsulation.”

+ HERMAN PAUL, Distance and Self-Distanciation: Intellectual Virtue and Historical Method around 1900, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 104-116.

What did “historical distance” mean to historians in the Rankean tradition? Although historical distance is often equated with temporal distance, an analysis of Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode reveals that for German historians around 1900 distance did not primarily refer to a passage of time that would enable scholars to study remote pasts from retrospective points of view. If Bernheim’s manual presents historical distance as a prerequisite for historical interpretation, the metaphor rather conveys a need for self-distanciation. Self-distanciation is not a Romantic desire to “extinguish” oneself, but a virtuous attempt to put one’s own ideas and intuitions about the working of the world between brackets in the study of people who might have understood the world in different terms. Although Bernheim did not explicitly talk about virtue, the article shows that his Lehrbuch nonetheless considers self-distanciation a matter of virtuous behavior, targeted at an aim that may not be fully realizable, but ought to be pursued with all possible vigor. For Bernheim, then, distance requires epistemological virtue, which in turn calls for intellectual character, or what Bernheim’s generation considered scholarly selfhood (wissenschaftliche Persönlichkeit). Not a mapping of time onto space, but a strenuous effort to mold “scholarly characters,” truly able to recognize the otherness of the past, appears to be characteristic of Bernheim’s view of historical distance.

+ RIK PETERS, Constitutional Interpretation: A View from a Distance, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 117-135.

This paper explores how the notion of distance works in the practice of interpretation by studying the philosophical underpinnings of the originalism debate in American constitutionalism. Focusing on some of its most important spokespeople, the paper shows that they start from the historicist presupposition that distance can in principle be overcome by a reconstruction of the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution. With the help of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who explicitly based his philosophical hermeneutics on the notion of distance, this presupposition will be criticized. The paper concludes that the originalist and hermeneuticist positions do not mutually exclude each other, but can be synthesized if they are seen as different questions about the same text. The meaning of the Constitution is therefore not given but is dependent on the direction of the questions asked by the interpreter. From this question-dependency of meaning it follows that interpretation follows the law of acoustics: “Angle of incidence equates angle of reflection.”

+ FRANK ANKERSMIT, The Transfiguration of Distance into Function, History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 139-149.

The point of departure of this essay is the intuition that the relationship between the past and the present (or between the past as the object of historical investigation and what is said about it by the historian) should be conceived of in terms of temporal distance. The spatial metaphor of distance at work in this intuition is thought to provide the basis for the epistemological model appropriate for understanding the nature of historical knowledge. This results in two claims: 1) epistemology is the philosophical instrument we must rely upon for understanding historical writing, and 2) the metaphor of distance is—whether one is aware of it or not—the model for most, if not all, epistemological thought. This essay discusses the pros and cons of these two claims. It argues that the two claims are indeed the best way to begin our analysis of the relationship between the past and the historical text or representation. However, we cannot afford to stop there; indeed, we must ask ourselves where the associations we have with the metaphor of temporal distance may, in the end, be misleading. This will enable us to recognize that the notion of distance will, finally, have to yield its prerogatives to that of the notion of function. Historical writing is functionalist in the sense that the historical text is a substitute for the past discussed in it. That is its function. Hence the essay’s title.