Sublime Historical Experience

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by F.R. Ankersmit

Stanford University Press

Due/Published March 2005, 504 pages, paper

ISBN 0804749361

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes (the possibility of) historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Experience in history and in philosophy

1. Linguistic transcendentalism in extremis: The case of Richard Rorty

2. From language to experience

3. Huizinga and the experience of the past

4. Fragments of a history of historical experience

5. Gadamer and historical experience

6. (Pragmatist) aesthetic experience and historical experience

7. Subjective historical experience: The past as elegy

8. Sublime historical experience

Epilogue: Rousseau and Hölderlin

Notes

Index