‘PRESENCE’ AND REPRESENTATION
‘Das Chor it eine lebendige Mauer gegen die anstürmende
Wirklichkeit, weil er – der Satyrchor – das Dasein
wahrhaftiger, wirklicher, vollständiger abbildet als der
gemeinhin
sich
als
einzige
Realität
achtende
Kulturmensch’1.
Abstract
There are no dictionary meanings, or authoritative discussions of ‘presence’ fixing the significance of this word
in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of a great freedom
of manoeuvre when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement of its use is that should maximally
contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall begin by
expounding how I propose to relate ‘presence’ to representation. My argument will be that we remain with
representation still in the empire of language, whereas ‘presence’ suggests how to move beyond it, and why it
would be a good and timely idea to try to do so. In short, we really need this run-up of representation in order to
be ready for the take-off of ‘presence’. I shall have recourse to the notion of sublime experience in order to
move from representation to ‘presence’ and make use of Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie for explaining all
this. Finally, I shall discuss how Gumbrecht’s and Runia’s conceptions of ‘presence’ can be integrated into my
argument.
1. Introduction
Etymology already requires us to relate ‘presence’ to representation. For ‘representation’
literally means to make something present again. Or, to be more exact, to make something
present which presently is absent. So the notion of representation somehow ties together those
of ‘presence’ and of ‘absence’. This should awaken our interest. For the notions of ‘presence’
and of ‘absence’ clearly exclude each other mutually. Things cannot be both at the same time.
So why should this funny concept of ‘representation’ deliberately provoke this open
confrontation between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ - and how could it possibly survive semantic
suicide when doing so? More specifcally, what could it possibly mean to ‘make present again’
what is ‘absent’. How can we say of something which is absent ‘that it has been made present
again’? Or that something is ‘present’ in its ‘absence’? These are difficult questions and this
essay is, in fact, an attempt to answer them.
So one thing will be clear at this early stage of my argument already. For, obviously,
any answer to these questions must succeed in re-defining the notions of presence and
absence in such a way that semantic suicide can be avoided. In the course of my argument I
hope to offer such re-definitions of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ mainly by an investigation of
Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie and I shall try to make clear how this can deepen our
understanding of both the notions of representation and ‘presence’.
One last remark before embarking on our philosophical journey. I mentioned above
these two notions of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ together, suggesting thereby that there should
be a certain symmetry in the kind of philosophical problems occasioned by each of them. But
this suggestion is wrong. For it is ‘presence’ rather than ‘absence’ which is the real troublemaker. Think of the three paradigmatic cases of representation: aesthetic representation,
1
F. Nietzsche, Die geburt der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus, in id., Werke I. Herausgegeben von
Karl Schlechta, Frankfurt am Main 1969; 49, 50.
1
historical representation and political representation. In each of these three cases the meaning
of the term ‘absence’ is fairly straightforward: the sitter for a portrait is clearly ‘absent’ - he
may have been dead for centuries already -, furthermore, it will need no clarification what we
mean when saying that the past it ‘absent’, and obviously the electorate itself is ‘absent’ when
its representatives assemble in our parliaments. But what could it mean to say that, after all,
the sitter for the portrait, the past or the electorate are, nevertheless, somehow ‘present’ in
such cases? How could they manage to perform such a feat of magic? That’s not an easy
question to answer. So it need not surprise that my essay will be far more circumstantial about
‘presence’ than about ‘absence’.
2. Theories of representation
We had best start with having a quick look at the theories of representation that are en vogue
nowadays. There are two of them, the resemblance theory of representation and the
substitution theory of representation.
According to the resemblance theory a representation should resemble what it
represents. A drawing is a good representation of a tree or a house if it resembles that tree or
house. It follows as a matter of course that the criteria for resemblance must then also be our
criteria for ‘presence’. A representation has ‘presence’ if it resembles what it represents.
Surely, this undoubtedly is a clear and unambiguous definition of ‘presence’. On the other
hand, I expect that most people will have some misgivings about the definition. Fir it seems to
miss what we intuitively associate with ‘presence’: is ‘presence’ not suggestive of a
fascination, of a being tied somehow to what we see etc.? And it seems unlikely that mere
resemblance might succeed in achieving this. Think of the photos of politicians in our
newspapers: the fact that they closely resemble whom they represent, does not compensate in
the least for the sad lack of ‘presence’ of most of those politicians themselves. There is little
auratic2 about mere resemblance. So our reaction will probably be that the definition fails to
explain how the drawing of a tree may make that tree present (again). The definition therefore
seems to beg the question of what ‘presence’ really is. But then the protagonist of the
resemblance theory will probably disdainfully riposte that our misgivings only prove how
much we still are the captives of unsustainable illusions, and that we should be grateful to the
resemblance theory for having dispelled our semantic confusions about ‘presence’.
But intuitions are remarkably resistant to argument – and often have good reasons to
be so unamenable to Reason. So let’s now investigate whether the substitution theory might
be kinder to our intuitions. According the substitution theory a representation represents a
represented if it can function as a substitute for the represented. In Gombrich’s well-known
example a hobby horse is a representation of a real horse, since for the child playing with it, it
may function as the substitute of a real horse3. The idea is clear enough and will need no
further clarification. There is an epistemological and an ontological dimension to the
substitution theory of representation.
The epistemological dimension can be re-phrased in terms of a fairly decisive critique
of the resemblance theory. In his Languages of art Nelson Goodman famously pointed out
that the resemblance theory is essentially incomplete since it fails to define the notion of
resemblance. To use Goodman’s technical terminology, we can only properly speak of
resemblance if we have at our disposal a ‘notational system’ fixing what is to count as
It would certainly pay to investigate more closely the relationship between (Benjamin’s notion of) ‘aura’ and
‘presence’.
3
There is an interesting aspect to this formulation. For observe that it makes no difference to say 1) that the
hobby horse may function for the child as a real horse and 2) that the hobby horse may function for the child as a
substitute of a real horse. We may infer from this that the subsitute is not experienced as a substitute by the child.
For if this were not the caee only 2) would be the proper formulation here.
2
2
resemblance. Think of maps. A map is reliable representation of part of the globe if the rules
of cartographical projection have correctly been applied. Now, the crucial fact is that these
notational systems cannot be determined on the basis of what the world is like. They have no
fundamentum in re, so to say. Take, again, maps. There are many different systems for
cartographical projection – but the globe itself is supremely indifferent to what system we
shall adopt. It is merely a matter of tradition, of elegance, of convenience or of practical
concern whether we prefer one system to another. Thus, we may have sound and excellent
reasons for whatever choice we make here – but whatever these reasons may be, it will by
now be clear that resemblance could not possibly be one of them. So that must inevitably
mean the end of the resemblance theory. Moreover, the resemblance theory is helpless if we
have to do with words and texts. For words and texts do nor resemble what they stand for –
and any attempt to define resemblance in such a way that it explains how words or texts relate
to things will be either circular, or nonsense (or both).
Two conclusions follow from this. In the first place, that the substitution theory is
more convincing than the resemblance theory of representation. But of more significance in
the present context is a second conclusion. The substitution theory defeated its rival by
making clear that each epistemological account of representation is doomed to failure. It
follows that epistemology can be of no use for clarifying the relationship between
representation and presence either. So we had now best turn to the ontological dimension of
the substitution theory and see whether this may offer some better prospects.
The crucial datum here is the following. Things represented such as sitters for a
portrait, the past or the people belong to the domain of things; ontologically they are part of
the world, not of language. Wholly unproblematic, of course. But this must then also be true
of their representations, if these are to be believable substitutes of their representeds in the
way required by the substitution theory. For if representations would not satisfy this condition
of being part of the world as well, we could impossibly regard them to be believable
candidates for being substitutes of what they represent. It may be helpful to remind here of a
certain ambiguity in the word ‘representation’. We can say that this house ‘represents’ a value
of a certain sum of money. But the sum of money does not ‘represent’ the house as meant by
the substitution theory. The money is not such a believable candidate for functioning as a
substitute for the house, in the way that we can say this of a picture of the house. And the
explanation is that there is an ontological gap between the money and the house which is
somehow bridged by a painting of the house. So the substitution theory rightly requires us to
attribute to representations the same ontological status as to what they represent. Gombrich’s
hobby horse is no less one more item on the inventory of the world than a real horse.
This will probably not yet sound too provocative. More surprising is, however, that
the ontological pull of representation can be so strong that it even succeeds in pulling certain
uses of language over the gap ordinarily separating language and the world. Think of
historical representation. We have historical texts, historical representations in order to
compensate for an absent past – if the past were as real, if it were just as much of an
ontological given for us as trees and houses, we would not need historical texts. They are, for
us, the really indispensable substitutes for the past itself and this is why they tend to acquire
the ontological status of the past. To put it metaphorically, the absent past creates an
ontological vacuum so strong that historical language is sucked into it and truly becomes part
of the ontological domain of trees and houses4.
4
What I have been giving here is, admittedly, merely an intuitive argument. For a technically convincing
argument for the claim that historical texts have the ontological status of things, see my History and Tropology.
The rise and fall of metaphor, Berkeley 1994; 88 – 94 and my Historical Representation, Stanford 2001; 11 –
13, 81, 82, 236, 237.
3
This is an interesting fact from the perspective of ‘presence’. For this ontological pull
of representation, so strikingly manifesting itself when the historian succeeds in adding new
items to the world’s inventory with his historical language, can painlessly be rephrased in
terms of ‘presence’. For then language, in its representational use, apparently has acquired an
aura that it always lacks as long as it is at home with itself. Under such circumstances, it
succeeds in combining the effects that both language and the world may have on us. It may
then affect us in the same way that poetry sometimes does – and who would object when we
then attribute to language this quality of ‘presence’? So if language crosses this threshold
between language and the world, who would deny us the right to speak of the ‘presence’
effects of historical or poetic language5? And would that not entail that we should relate
‘presence’ to the ontological dimension of representation, that is, to its capacity to confer on
representation the same ontological status as what it represents?
3. ‘Presence’ and representation
Or, so it may seem. For perhaps we have been moving a bit too fast here. Let us have a look
again at the substitution theory. We should primarily think here, of course, of one thing (the
representation) taking the place, or being exchanged for another (the represented). And this
suggests a picture of what representation ideally is like. For let us for a moment take seriously
Leibniz’s talk of the identity of indiscernibles, hence the idea that we could have two
specimens of a certain type of thing, say T1 and T2, that are completely indiscernible. The
substitution theory then seems to suggest that T2 is T1’s best representation – and vice versa.
But this would involve us into an absurdity. For if T2 is T1’s best representation and since,
next, T2 and T1 are indiscernible, it would follow that we must hold that T1 is T1’s best
representation. But this is at odds with the definition of representation as the exchange of one
thing (a represented) by another thing (its representation). So the substitution theory entails a
conception of what representation ideally looks like conflicting with how it defines
representation.
Now, one the (many) nice things about the notion of ‘presence’ is that is may help us
out of this unpleasant impasse. Suppose we have a landscape and a painting of that landscape.
In whatever way we define the notion of ‘presence’, it cannot possibly be doubted that we will
apply this definition in a different way to either the landscape or to its representation. What
grants ‘presence’ to a landscape will differ from what grants ‘presence’ to a painting of that
landscape. For example, the landscape depicted by Karel Dujardin on his painting called ‘Le
Diamant’ since the 18th century6 – supposing the landscape to be real - is without much
interest; in fact, it is decidedly dull with its long straight and bare slope at the background. Yet
Dujardin’s tiny painting of only 20.5 by 27 cms possesses a ‘presence’ making it into a rival
of some of Ruisdael’s most majestic canvases. Even a wall of many yards in length and height
will be ‘crushed’, as it were, by the painting’s sheer ‘presence’, if we hang it there. Still more
telling is sculpture. Think of all the representations of the human figure, male and female, that
have been made from Donatello and Michelangelo, down to Rodin and Moore. Many of these
sculptures have a truly overwhelming ‘presence’, outweighing by far that of the human
individuals presumably used as models by these sculptors, and whom we would not bother to
look at twice if we happened to encounter them in real life7. Taking into account these
indubitable facts about aesthetic representation, we will begin to surmise that there is
5
When opposing poetry to the language of the historian and of the philosopher Sir Philip Sidney famously
wrote: ‘the poet yields to the power of the mind an image of that whereof (the other two) bestow but a wordish
description’.
6
Now in the Fitz Williams Museum in Cambridge.
7
Obviously, if the human figure is represented nakedly, this will substantially add to their ‘presence’ by putting
into motion the mechanisms of erotic desire.
4
something peculiarly ‘asymmetric’ about ‘presence’, in the sense that the degree of ‘presence’
we may ascribe to representation exceeds by far the amount of ‘presence’ we are willing to
grant to what these representations represent. Apparently ‘presence’ is a quality of the
representation rather than of the represented.
This observation may help us out of the impasse of the substitution theory we
encountered a moment ago. This impasse originated from a conflict apparently inherent in
the substitution theory. For on the one hand the subsitution theory seemed to require the
obliteration of all differences between the represented and its representation ultimately giving
way to their being completely identical, whereas, on the other, it compelled us to uphold the
represented and its representation being different from each other. But the notion of
‘presence’ will make all of the difference here, in the true sense of that expression. For
‘presence’ is something we ascribe, or grant to the representation, rather than that ‘presence’
should be one of a representation’s constitutive features. ‘Presence’ comes from the outside,
as it were, though it certainly is a kind of compliment we pay to a representation only on the
condition that it possesses certain qualities itself. So it may well be that there are little, or
even no material differences between a represented and its representation so that they
ultimately are truly identical – and, yet, this need no longer involve the substitution theory
into nasty problems. For the asymmetry between the represented and its representation due to
the preference of ‘presence’ to attach itself to the latter, will be sufficient to distinguish
between the representation and the represented, even if the two of them are materially
completely identical. One is reminded here of Danto’s well-known argument about the Brillo
boxes and that one could rephrase by saying that Warhol’s Brillo box possessed a ‘presence’
that its counterparts in a grocery shop lack – even though there are no differences between
them.
In sum, the substitution theory got into trouble because of its uncertainty about
whether a represented and its representation should, ideally, be identical – but the notion of
‘presence’ helps us out of this impasse, since it makes clear that there should be such a
difference even if the two are identical. Moreover, the notion of ‘presence’ also makes clear
why we got lost in this impasse at all. We believed, initially, material similarity or difference
to be decisive. And, indeed, as long as we do have only material similarity or difference in
mind, the substitution theory will be in trouble. However, as soon as we see that ‘presence’ is
a supervenient property, something that we may ascribe to representations (or not, of course),
we will recognize that material similarity or difference is immaterial here.
Nevertheless, there is something odd about all this. For we may well ask ourselves: if
‘presence’ is something we ascribe to representations, if ‘presence’ attaches itself to
representations rather than to its representeds, if it therefore seems to come from somewhere
outside the interaction between a represented and its representation, what, then, is its source?
Let me put it this way. Initially, we will be inclined to relate ‘presence’ to the being
present to us of the things in the world, or their ‘Vorhanden-sein’ to use Heideggerian jargon.
The ‘presence’ of the chair on which I am now sitting, or of the keyboard on which I am
writing this essay seem to be the prototypical examples of ‘presence’. What could be more
‘present’ to us, in the sense meant here, than this kind of things? And, yet, I argued above the
profoundly anti-Platonic position that representations are typically more ‘present’ than what
they represent. So where does this ‘presence’ come from if the represented, if reality itself,
does not endow it with its credentials? Could there be anything that is more ‘real’, and more
present than even reality itself? And, if so, what, then, is this ‘anything’ and where should we
locate it?
4. Nietzsche on tragedy
5
Having arrived at this stage, I propose to consider what undoutedly is the locus classicus of
the notion of representation, that is, Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie. When commenting on
that book, Arthur Danto discusses:
‘that sort of magical re-presentation paradigmatically exemplified in the Dionysian rites charcterized by
Nietzsche, where the god is actually invoked into re-presence by the appropriate religious technology.
Each appearance of the god resembles each other, and an imitational representation of the god’s
appearing resembles this again, except that in this instance the epiphany is denoted by the tragic
structures. And so again if statues of kings and gods were originally set up in the spirit of making the kind
or god present wherever this form was present – the statue would have to be believed to resemble what
was believed to be the king or god re-presented. And when this magical relationship of complex identity
was dissolved, and statues were interpreted merely as representations of the gods and kings, they did not
have to undergo change in form to undergo change in semantic function. (…) All I wish to stress at this
point is that what we would call statues, gravures, rites, and the like, underwent a transformation from
being simply part of reality, itself magically structured by virtue of the fact that special things, regarded as
possessing special powers, were capable of multiple representations, into things that contrasted with
reality, standing outside and against it, so to speak, as reality underwent a corresponding transformation
in which it lost its magic in men’s eyes. Artworks became the sort of representation we now regard
language as being, though even language – words – once formed a magical part of reality and participated
in the substance of things we would now say merely form part of their extensions’ 8.
Danto’s complex argument is, in fact, an argument about the origin of the work of art and
about its ontological status. The idea is, roughly, as follows: in Greek antiquity, at the time
when Sophocles and Aischylos gave birth to tragedy, gods and kings were believed to be
present themselves in the artworks representing them, regardless of whether these artworks
were tragedies, statues or rites; and this endowed these artworks with their unique ‘presence’.
At a later stage, however, these works of art lost again this ‘presence’, gods and kings were
now separated from their representations. And in this way the work of art came into being as
we presently conceive of it.
However, as Danto emphasizes at the end of the quote, this is only part of the whole
story. For something of the work of art’s former ‘presence’ was preserved, after all. This
‘presence’ was now attributed to the category of works of art as such: works of art were
granted an ontological status of their own, setting them, as a specific category of objects, apart
from the more pedestrian objects in our world, such as trees and houses. Danto perceives here
a parallel with the fate of language. Just like art, language began with being part of a magical
reality and, again just like art, it emancipated itself from that magical reality that, in both
cases, lost its previous magical features in the process. And, again, in both cases a new
domain came into being as opposed to reality, namely, the domains of language and that of
the work of art9.
Danto presents all this, more or less, as a ‘just so story’ and refrains from a discussion
of how Nietzsche came to these insights and what is their validity. Since this essay focuses
on ‘presence’, on how it relates to representation and on what meaning we should give to this
notion of ‘presence’, we cannot afford here ourselves Danto’s somewhat lackadaisical
attitude. So in order to gain more insight into the notion of ‘presence’ we had best take a
8
A.C. Danto, The transfiguration of the common place, Cambridge (Ma) 1983; 76, 77
an interesting parallel is to be found in Gumbrecht’s discussion of the meaning of the transsubstantation.
Gumbrecht argues that the word ‘est’ in ‘hoc est corpus meum’ was originally taken literally; whereas since the
Reformation the word was read as ‘standing for’. See H.U. Gumbrecht, Production of presence. What meaning
cannot convey, Stanford 2004; 29. We may observe here, then, a shift from the ‘magical’ to a representational
use of language. Aquino combined both positions in his view of the transsubstantation: ‘in der Summa
Theologiae beantwortet er (Thomas v. A.) gleich eingangs die Frage nach der rechten Benennung des Sakraments
mit der schon geläufigen Unterscheidung: Opfergabe (hostia) heisse es insofern, als es Christus selbst enthälte,
sacrifium hingegen, sofern es in Sonderheit das Leiden Christi “repräsentiere”’. See H. Hoffmann, Repräsentation.
Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1974; 65 ff.
9
6
closer look at Nietzsche’s first born. And it will then become clear that the Schopenhauerian
inspiration of Nietzsche’s argument is quite helpful for obtaining a better grasp of ‘presence’.
In order to grasp Nietzsche’s argument, we should start with focussing on what he
writes on the role of the chorus in the tragedy of Sophocles and Aischylos. He opposes here
the view of Schlegel to that of Schiller. According to Friedrich Schlegel the chorus is meant to
destroy the barrier between the spectator and the scene10. As a result what happens on the
scene becomes part of the spectator’s own reality; the tragedy no longer is merely a
representation of some story – no, the gods, kings and heroes are now as real as anything else
in the spectator’s reality. They are now really there themselves. As Schlegel put it himself, the
tragedy is ‘leibhaft empirisch’, and not merely an aesthetic phenomenon11. But Nietzsche
prefers Schiller,
‘der den Chor als eine lebendige Mauer betrachtete, die die Tragödie um sich herum zieht, um sich von
der wirklichen Welt rein abzuschliessen und sich ihren idealen Boden und ihre poetische Freiheit zu
bewahren’12.
To rephrase it all in terms of a famous argument of Meyer Schapiro 13 (and of Derrida), the
chorus is like the picture-frame isolating a pictorial reality from our ‘normal’ reality. Like the
picture-frame the chorus warns us that we are now entering a new reality, different from our
own, but no less real for that. Now, everything depends, of course, on what exactly Nietzsche
may mean with this notion of a new or extra reality making itself felt in the tragedy. Is this a
mere manner of speaking, in the way that we may say that marriage, a new job or retirement
had made us enter a ‘new reality’? Or is this phrase meant to be taken literally? And, if so,
what could this possibly mean? For reality is not the kind of thing easily lending itself to
reckless multiplication, as we know at least since Ockham. Does reality by definition not
exclude anything outside itself, such as supposedly ‘other realities’? But if we go on reading
Nietzsche, we shall observe that he really has ‘le courage de ses opinions’ and requires us to
take literally his talk about a new or extra reality. So much becomes clear if we take into
account the following passage:
‘Vielleicht gewinnen wir einen Ausgangspunkt der Betrachtung, wenn ich die Behauptung hinstelle, dass
sich der Satyr, das fingierte Naturwesen, zu dem Kulturmenschen in gleicher Weise verhält, wie die
dionysische Musik zur Zivilisation. Von letzterer sagt Richard Wagner, dass sie von der Musik
aufgehoben wurde wie der Lampenschein vom Tageslicht. In gleicher Weise, glaube ich, fühlte sich der
griechische Naturmensch im Angesicht des Satyrchors aufgehoben: und dies ist der nächste Wirkung der
dionysischen Tragödie, dass der Staat und die Gesellschaft, überhaupt die Klüfte zwischen Mensch und
Mensch einem übermächtigen Einheitsgefühle weichen, welches an das Herz der Natur zurückführt’ 14.
10
This seems to have been the situation in the Middle Ages when actors and the spectators of a play still shared
the same reality. When discussing medieval manuscripts indicating how actors should behave, Gumbrecht
commentss: ‘what the manuscripts then again concentrate upon (…) is the exit or the farewell of the actors. In
other words, the manuscripts providedd a path for the undoing of the primary “theatrical” situation – in which
the actors’ bodies were not separated, by a curtain, from the bodies of the spectators, and in which it was clearly
not the function of the actors’ bodies to produce a complex meaning that the spectators were supposed to
inductively decipher’, Gumbrecht, op. cit.; 31. For this interplay of everyday reality with theatircal reality and
the metaphor of the theatrum mundi, see F.R. Ankersmit, Sublime historical experience, Stanford 2005; 270 –
272.
11
F. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus, in id., Werke I. Herausgegeben
von Karl Schlechta, Frankfurt am Main 1983; 45.
12
Nietzsche, op. cit.; 46. Though on p. 50 reverses his assessment of Schlegel and Schiller.
13
M. Schapiro, On some problems in the semiotics of visual art: field and vehicle in image-signs, Semiotica 1
(1969); 224, 225. Derrida rolled Schapiro’s argument out into a whole book: see J. Derrida, La vérité en
peinture, Paris 1986.
14
Nietzsche, op. cit.; 47.
7
This is a very illuminating passage, which brings us to the heart of the issue. For what
Nietzsche does here is to introduce, indeed, a ‘new reality’ while, at the same time, explaining
how this ‘new reality’ is related to reality proper. Most suggestive here is this comparison by
Wagner of lamplight with day-light – and where tragic reality is analogous to daylight and our
own reality to that of lamplight. Our own reality is ‘taken out’ of tragic reality, it is a mere
reflection, so to speak, of the latter which can only give us ‘der ungeschminkte Ausdruck der
Wahrheit’15.
5. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the sublime
Now, we may ask ourselves again what makes - and justifies - Nietzsche to utter such bold
assertions. This brings us to Nietzsche’s (and Wagner’s) Schopenhauerian inspiration. As we
all know, Schopenhauer took Kant’s distinction between noumenal and phenomenal reality as
his point of departure – with its implication that we can have no knowledge of the ‘Ding an
sich’. But, as Rorty once amusingly observed, philosophers can never for long resist the urge
to ‘eff the ineffable’. And so it was with Schopenhauer. His argument was that the human
mind is Janus-faced: when it looks outside it will perceive Kantian phenomenal reality, but
when it looks inside, it will get an inkling of the noumenon. So the noumenon is not to be
found somewhere ‘behind’ the things of the world, which is, more or less, the picture
suggested by Kant’s critical philosophy itself, but in our inner self. And what we will dimly
perceive if we look in the depths of ourselves is some primeval, universal and allencompassing drive that Schopenhauer calls ‘the Will’. Phenomenal reality is a transcendental
objectification of the Schopenhauerian Will.
But whereas Kant proposes his categories of the understanding for this transcendental
objectification, Schopenhauer came, instead, with his notion of the principium
individuationis. That is to say, the noumenal Will precedes the world’s consisting of
individual things; for this partitioning of noumenal reality into individual things is achieved
by the principium individuationis. Finally, just like Kant Schopenhauer argues that noumenal
reality cannot be an object of experience or of knowledge. There is, however, one exception,
and this is art, more specifically, music16. Schopenhauer is somewhat unclear about whether
music is (a manifestation of) the noumenal Will itself, or merely a picture or representation of
the Will, its ‘Abbild’, as he calls it (see also note 16)). But let’s not press this further. The
main insight here is that in art, and in music, something of the transcendental Will can be
perceived – and that this is what grants to art and music their ‘presence’, to put it in the right
terminology17.
Now a great many things will become clear. To begin with, we can now understand
what exactly Nietzsche had in mind when opposing the dionysian and the apollonian to each
other and why he so much emphasized the dionysian character of tragedy: tragedy and the
dionysian express a reminiscence of noumenal reality and may, hence, reveal to us Truths
more profound and universal than anything that (rational) reflection on our reality can
15
Nietzsche, op cit.; 50.
As Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer himself: ‘diesem allen zufolge können wir die Erscheinende Welt, oder die
Natur, und die Musik als zwei verschiedene Ausdrücke derselben sache ansehen, welche selbst daher das allein
Vermittelnde der Analogie beider ist, dessen Erkenntnis erfordert wird, um jene Analogie ein zu sehen. Die
Musik ist demnach, wenn als Ausdruck der Welt angesehen, eine im höchsten Grad allgemeine Sprache, die sich
sogar zur Allegemeinheit der Begriffe ungefähr verhält wie diese zu den einzelnen Dinge. (…) Denn die Musik,
ist, wie gesagt, darin von allen anderen Künsten verschieden, dass sie nicht Abbild der Erscheinung, oder
richtiger, der adäquaten Objektivität des Willens, sondern unmittelbar Abbild des Willens selbst ist und also zu
allem Physischen in der Welt das Metaphysische, zu aller Erscheinung das Ding an sich darstellt’ (pp. 89, 90).
17
Nietzsche uses Kantian terminology himself when saying that the revelations of art provide the common
ground to ‘dem ewigen Kern der Dinge, dem Ding an sich, und der gesamten Erscheinungswelt’. See Nietzsche,
op. cit; 50.
16
8
produce. That reflection can only yield mere apollonian truths. Second, we now also
understand why Socrates is no less important in Nietzsche’s story than in the one Hegel had
told us in the famous section from his lectures on the philosophy of history entitled ‘Das
Verderben der Griechischen Sittlichkeit’ (and that must have been in Nietzsche’s mind when
writing Die Geburt der Tragödie18). In both cases rational reflection – that is Socrates –
destroyed the Greek’s previous susceptibility to the profound Truths expressed by tragedy.
Nor need it surprise us that Socrates (and Plato) never showed any interest for tragedy – as
Nietzsche perceptively points out.
Of course there are differences between Hegel and Nietzsche as well. For Hegel
welcomed Socrates’s intervention as the entry into a new world, whereas Nietzsche deeply
regretted what Socrates had now irrevocably condemned to the past. Though this dimension
of an irreparable loss is present in Hegel as well19. Next, whereas Hegel focuses on Socrates
exclusively, Nietzsche pours most of his scorn on Euripides for having robbed tragedy of its
sublimity by rationalizing it. We will now also grasp the point of Nietzsche’s phrase of ‘Die
Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik’20. The idea is not that the Greeks had started
with the discovery of music and had then moved on to tragedy; rather tragedy shared with
music this dionysian power to offer universalia ante rem instead of mere universalia post
rem or in re. Lastly, the subtitle of Nietzsche’s book – Die Geburt der Tragödie oder
Griechentum und Pessimismus now need no longer puzzle us. It was Schopenhauerian
pessimism which had made Nietzsche susceptible to the darker and tragic aspects of Greek
culture and to which Winckelmann’s apollonian tradition had always remained so completely
insensitive.
But there is one other issue which I would like to discuss somewhat more lengthily.
Recall Schopenhauer’s exchange of the Kantian categories of the understanding for the
principium individuationis. The implication is that dionysian tragedy tends to do away with
what makes individuals into individuals: it really dissolves the contours of our selves. What is
then at stake was already formulated some eighty years before Nietzsche by Hölderlin. In the
so-called metric version of his novel Hyperion Hölderlin introduces the ‘wise man’, in all
likelihood modelled on Rousseau and whom Hölderlin deeply admired.This wise man tells to
Hyperion a story about the origins of mankind having some striking parallels with Nietzsche’s
historicization of Schopenhauer’s transcendentalism. The wise man begins with expounding
how man descended from Heaven – and where Heaven is, in fact, an idealized version of
Schopenhauer’s reality in which the principium individuationis has not yet made its entry:
- ‘Als unser Geist, begann
Er lächelnd nun, sich aus dem freien Fluge
Des Himmlischen verlor, und erdwärts sich,
Vom Aether neigt’, und mit dem Überflusse
Sich so die Armut gattete, da ward
Die Liebe. Das geschah, am Tage, da
Den Fluten sich Aphrodite entwand.
Am Tage, da die schöne Welt für uns
Begann, begann für uns die Dürftigkeit
Des Lebens und wir tauschten das Bewusstsein
Nietzsche substantially elaborates Hegel’s account by what he does with the Oedipus motif. Nietzsche casts
Oedipus in the role that Hegel had given to Socrates, i.e. that of the world historical individual whose terrible
fate is occasioned by his supreme wisdom. Speaking about Oedipus Nietzsche writes: ‘ja, der Mythus scheint
uns zuraunen zu wollen, dass die Weisheit und gerade die dionysische Weisheit ein naturwidriger Greuel sei,
dass der, welcher durch sein Wissen die Natur in dem Abgrund der Vernichtung stürzt, auch an sich selbst die
Auflösung der Natur zu erfahern habe. “Die Spitze der Weisheit kehrt sich gegen den Weisen; Weisheit ist ein
Verbrechen an der Natur” (…).’ (p. 57)
19
See F.R. Ankersmit, Sublime historical experience, Stanford 2005; chapter 8.
20
Nietzsche, op. cit.; 93.
18
9
Für unsre Reinigkeit und Freiheit ein. –
Der Leidensfreie Geist befasst
Sich mit dem Stoffe nicht, ist aber auch
Sich keines Dings und seiner nicht bewusst,
Für ihn ist keine Welt, denn ausser ihm
Ist nichts. – Doch, was ich sag, ist nur Gedanke. –
Nun fühlen wir die Schranken unsers Wesens
Und die gehemmte Kraft sträubt ungeduldig
Sich gegen ihre Fesseln, uns es sehnt der Geist
Zum ungetrübten Aether sich zurück.
Doch ist in uns auch wider etwas, das
Die Fesseln gern behält, denn würd in uns
Das Göttliche von keinem Widerstande
Beschränkt – wir fühlten uns und ander nicht.
Sich aber nich zu fühlen is der Tod,
Von nichts zu wissen, und vernichtet sein
Ist eins für uns. – Wie sollten wir den Trieb,
Unendlich fortzuschreiten, uns zu läutern,
Uns zu veredlen, zu befrein, verleugnen?
Das wäre tierisch. Doch wir sollten auch
Des Triebs, beschränkt zu werden, zu empfangen,
Nicht stolz uns überheben. Denn es wäre
Nicht menschlich, und wir töteten uns selbst’21.
Hölderlin most poetically expresses here an ambiguity of human existence anticipating in
several respects Schopenhauer’s Janus-faced character of the human mind and his elevation of
the principium individuationis into its most fundamental category. For Hölderlin explains that
we are always torn between two desires mutually excluding each other. One the one hand, we
feel the desire to undo the workings of the principium individuationis; this dionysian
dissolution of our identity seems to promise a return to Heaven. Or, at least, to open our eyes
again to the forgotten Truths of tragedy. But on the other hand, we rather like these chains
that the principium individuationis has forged for us. For these chains make us into whom we
are – so when we get rid of them, we get rid of ourselves as well - and this is death, as
Hölderlin most cogently points out..
Now, this being pulled into two opposite and mutually excluding directions – the
return to Heaven on the one hand, and utter destruction, on the other – is, of course, the
hallmark of the sublime and of sublime experience. The sublime announces itself when an
irreconcilable conflict has arisen between the categories that we ‘normally’ rely upon in order
to make sense of (phenomenal) reality. It need not surprise us, therefore, that Nietzsche
implicitly relates dionysian tragedy to the sublime. He emphasizes how suffering (‘Leiden)’
and pleasure (‘Lust’) may paradoxically go together in the encounter with tragedy:
‘er (i.e. the spectator) schaudert vor den Leiden, die den Helden treffen werden, und hat doch bei ihnen
eine höhere, viel übermächtigere Lust. Er schaut mehr und tiefer als je und wünscht sich doch erblindet.
Woher werden wir diese wunderbare Selbstentzweiung, dies Umbrechen der Apollonischen Spitze ab zu
leiten haben, wenn nicht aus dem dionysischen Zauber (…)?’ 22.
Obviously, this is the kind of conflict that is central to the sublime. And elswehere Nietzsche
is even quite explicit about this relationhip with the sublime, when characterizing the satyrs of
the tragic chorus as ‘etwas Erhabenes und Göttliches’ and when saying that in tragedy we
encounter ‘das Erhabene als die künstlerische Bändigung des Entsetzlichen’23. In agreement
21
F. Hölderlin, Hyperion. Die metrische Fassung, in id., Sämtliche Werke. Herausgegeben vorn Friedrich
Beissner, Frankfurt am Main 1961; 673.
22
Nietzsche, op. cit.; 121
23
Nietzsche, op. cit.; 49
10
with Nietzsche’s argument, I propose to consider ‘presence’ as an aspect, or manifestation of
the sublime. This proposal firmly situates ‘presence’ in the domain of aesthetics; moreover, in
that part of aesthetics where it may proudly claim its superiority to other philosophical subdisciplines. For, as I have argued elsewhere24, the paradoxes typical of the sublime move us to
a perspective from which we can objectify epistemology and all that has been achieved by
philosophers since Descartes and Kant in the name of epistemology. The logical space of
epistemological discussion is a creation of the sublime, since in this space meaning can be
given to what is excluded as self-contradictory in epistemology itself (such as this going
together of ‘pleasure’ and ‘suffering’).
6. The sublime and ‘presence’
One more feature of ‘presence’ can be derived from this. For the obvious question now will
be how the sublime can escape unscathed the paradoxes on which each epistemology would
founder ignominiously. The explanation is that these paradoxes always orginate from
descriptions of the state of the subject; for example, something may happen to someone
causing suffering or pleasure in him or her. And then, indeed, some of these states of the
subject might either logically or empirically exclude each other. This is the kind of question
that epistemologists have always been so much interested in – though, of course, emotions
such as pain and pleasure rarely came in for much in their analyses. Undoubtedly because
emotions are a notoriously difficult subject to handle with precision and with the required
logical rigor. So that is why epistemologists preferably focused on knowledge, and on how
experience might cause the subject to be in certain ‘sentential states’, to use the
epistemologist’s jargon. But whether we deal with emotional states or with these sentential
states, it are always states of the subject that we are talking about. And then the
epistemological problem concerns the relationship between the object (or the world) and the
object (or between the object, on the one hand, and the language used by the subject for
expressing his experience or knowledge of the object, on the other).
But we get a wholly different picture, if the notions of subject and object are relegated
to the background and if the notion of experience becomes the only agent on the philosopher’s
scene that truly counts. For then these paradoxes or contradictions in which the sublime
involves us, will disappear. The explanation is that experience can sui generis not be related
to paradox or contradiction. Not so much because our experiences are ‘of a piece’, so to
speak; though that may be true as well. But rather because experiences, as such, have no
meaning; meaning only comes into being when they are the experience of a certain subject
and if the subject starts to articulate what having this experience means, or has meant, to him
or her. If, then, experiences have no meaning, contradiction is impossible, since contradiction
always requires meaning.
What sublime experience effects could be expressed with the following simile: think
of a prism by which white light is broken into different colours from red to blue. It is much
the same with the sublime, and where white light is analogous to sublime experience itself,
and whereas the light of different colours leaving the prism is analogous to the language we
use for expressing experience and knowledge. The prism then separates the sublime and
sublime experience, on the one hand, from meaning and experience having adapted itself to
the categories of meaning, on the other. And, to continue this metaphor, sublime experience
moves us upwards from the colours leaving the prism to that of the white light entering it, and
where the mutual exclusion of red and blue light has not yet announced itself. White light still
precedes the phase of the contradiction between ‘this is red’ and ‘this is not red (but blue)’
exclusively belonging to the light which leaves the prism (and where ‘this’ refers to all of the
24
see my Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford 2005; 337, 338.
11
light leaving the prism) 25. And so it is with experience: sublime experience is like the white
light entering the prism, whereas ‘normal’ experience and the language defining it, are like
the light leaving it.
In agreement with this, I would propose to relate the notion of ‘presence’ to that of the
sublime. That is to say, ‘presence’ is suggestive of the shock typical of sublime experience;
and this shock is caused by the unique capacity of the sublime to momentarily destroy our
image of the world as being a conjunction of both subject and object – so that we are left with
experience, more specifically with sublime experience only. When making this proposal, I am
convinced to remain with this quite close to what Gumbrecht attributed to ‘presence’ in his
wonderful book entitled Production of presence. What meaning cannot convey. For any
reader of this book cannot fail to be struck by how close Gumbrecht’s determination of
‘presence’ comes to what is traditionally associated with the sublime - especially when he
gives a kind of phenomenology of ‘presence’ in the book’s last chapter entitled
‘Epiphany/presentification/deixis’.
In the first place, there is Gumbrecht’s reference to aesthetic experience26; then there
is his insistence that ‘presence’ is to be related to ‘Erlebnis’ rather than to ‘Erfahrung’ – and
where we should recall that ‘Erlebnis’ retains the connotation of being overwhelmed by an
experience characteristic of the sublime, whereas in ‘Erfahrung’ we always remain ourselves
the master of our encounters with the world27. Next, we may think of Gumbrecht’s notion of
the ‘insularity’ of ‘presence’28 – and of how close this comes to how sublime experience
radically and ruthlessly breaks through all contextualizations of ‘normal’ experience. This is
where sublime experience so dramatically differs from the empiricist’s notion of experience
and where experience has been tamed and domesticated by language – hence, where
‘language goes all the way down’, as Rorty once famously put it. There is, furthermore, the
reference to the experience of music, which cannot fail to call to mind Schopenhauer’s
celebration of music as the experience of the sublime29. There is, next, Gumbrecht’s
observation that ‘presence’ always ‘has to do with this feeling of losing control’30 – which can
be explained by how the sublime requires us to abandon the regime of the subject/object
dichotomy for that of experience. And, lastly, there is Gumbrecht’s claim that ‘presence’ will
bring us to ‘what meaning cannot convey’, and which he considers to be so important to
‘presence’ that this even found its way to the title of his book. This apparently so outrageous
claim, so very much at odds with our contemporary infatuation with language and meaning,
can also be justified if we translate it into the terms of the sublime. For as we saw above,
sublime experience precedes the moment where language succeeds in securing its hold on
experience, and hence the dionysian stage where experience has not yet become the meek and
docile slave of language and meaning that empiricism made of it.
7. Gumbrecht and ‘presence’
I ended the previous section with a discussion of Gumbrecht’s recent book on ‘presence’ and
of how close his conception of ‘presence’ comes to the notion of the sublime. In this section I
wish to continue my debate with Gumbrecht. And in the next section I shall address the no
less fascinating analysis of ‘presence’ proposed by Eelco Runia.
Particularly illuminating in Gumbrecht’s account of ‘presence’ I found his reference to
Luhmann’s so-called second order observation and which Gumbrecht describes as follows:
see Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience; 268 – 271, 285, 345 , 346.
H.U. Gumbrecht, Production of presence. What meaning cannot convey, Stanford 2004, 96.
27
Gumbrecht, op. cit.; 99
28
Gumbrecht, op. cit.; 102
29
Gumbrecht, op. cit.; 109.
30
Gumbrecht, op. cit.; 116.
25
26
12
‘(…) the second order observer, the new observer role that would shape the epistemology of the
nineteenth century, was an observer condemned – rather than priviliged – to observe himself in the act of
observation. The emergence of this self-reflexive loop in the form of the second-order observer had two
major consequences. Firstly, the second-order observer realized that each element of knowledge and each
representation that he could ever produce would necessarily depend on the specific angle of his
observation. (…) At the same time, the second-order observer rediscovered the human body and, more
specifically, the human senses as an integral part of any world observation’ 31.
This second-order observer comes quite close to what I said a moment ago on epistemology
and on the sublime. In fact, one could well say that all epistemology is second-order
observation insofar as epistemology is an inquiry into how experience and knowledge come
into being; the epistemologist truly observes observation. So I would wholly agree with
Gumbrecht when he insists that the age of second-order observation also is the age of
‘presence’. Nevertheless, I would add two comments. In the first place, Gumbrecht tends to
connect the age of ‘presence’ to Foucault’s episteme of modernity beginning around 1800.
Whereas epistemology as a philosophical discipline is, of course, of a much older date and
originated in Foucault’s ‘classical’ episteme. But more important than chronology is the
following. Epistemologists have rarely been aware of the paradox of their enterprise of
second-order observation: for observing yourself when observing something, makes you into
both the subject and the object of observation. As subject you then coincide with yourself but
as object you see yourself as if you were someone else. Obviously, an epistemological
absurdity, but an absurdity invited by the very enterprise of epistemology itself. The
phenomenon is known in psychology and referred to there as de-personalization and derealization32. The experience is far from being pleasant and, again, refers us back to the
sublime, insofar as the sublime is the articulation of the epistemological absurdity of a subject
being, at the same time, its own object. An absurdity, moreover, we can only overcome by
overcoming the subject/object dichotomy in terms of experience and ‘presence’ - and by
regressing to the ‘dionysian’ stage where we have only experience and where subject and
object have not yet entered the scene.
Perhaps we may also relate this to what I found one of the most fascinating passages in
Gumbrecht’s book and where he discusses how modern criticism never succeeded in doing
justice to what we intuitively embrace in Aristotle’s distinction between substance and form. I
quote Gumbrecht:
‘the dichotomy between the “material” and the “immaterial” certainly does to hold for the Aristotelian
concept of sign. There is no “immaterial” meaning detached from a “”material signifier”. This is why the
Latin words hoc enim est corpus meum (“for this is my body”), through which the transsubstantiation –
that is, the transformation of the substance of bread into the substance of Christ’s body in the sacrament
of the Eucharist and the deictic gestures that went along with it – were perfectly plausible to medieval
culture’33.
Modern criticism thinks the transsubstantiation of the transformation of bread into the body of
Christ to be nonsense because of its strict distinction between substance and form; within the
modernist conception of the two of them there could not possibly be any continuity between
form and substance. ‘Form’ (the ritual of the Eucharist) could never produce ‘substantial’
change (i.e. bread becoming the body of Christ). Again, epistemological thought has been
decisive here: epistemological algorithms for how knowledge can come into being are
constitutive for the modernist conception of substance and form.. To put it in Kantian
31
H.U. Gumbrecht, The production of presence. What meaning cannot convey, Stanford 2005; 38, 39.
Ankersmit, op. cit.; 336, 337, 354.
33
Gumbrecht, op. cit.; 29.
32
13
terminology: the categories of the understanding are the forms enabling the transformation –
or, should I say, transsubstantiation? - of the substance of sensory experience into knowledge.
And even more suggestive is here Schopenhauer’s exchange of the Kantian categories of the
understanding for the principium individuationis. For this principle is the condition for the
emergence of the forms of all the individual things – objects, animals, human beings, cultural
artifacts etc. – constituting the universe that is known to us. Without the forms of the
principium individuationis there is only mere substance. And because of this epistemological
divide between the two of them, substance and form are as radically and irrevocably different
from each other as a circle’s form and its area. There is, on the one hand, the circle’s
‘immaterial’ circular form and, on the other, the ‘material’ area covered by it, that can be
expressed in square centimeters (and that could be enclosed by quite different forms, even
when remaining exactly the same ‘substance’, i.e. the same area).
But this is different in the Aristotelian conception of substance and form: for here we
will find a continuity between substance and form. But how can such a continuity come into
being? What could bely our so very persistent intuitions about this disjunction of substance
and form?
Here the example of historical writing can be illuminating – as always is the case
when we run up against the limitations of modernist epistemological thinking. For in
historical writing all that we say about the past always has a double function: in the first place
it will offer us a description of the past (and this is its material, or substantialist dimension),
but in the second place it will be part of how the historian proposes us to look at the past
analyzed by him (and this brings us to its formalist function)34. In sum, in historical writing
substance and form are always indissolubly linked together, and there is no substance without
fomr and no form without substance. This may help explain the secret of the
transsubstantiation. For if there is this continuity between form and substance it becomes
conceivable that a very strong form – such as that of the ‘Eucharist and the deictic gestures
that went along with it’ (to repeat Gumbrecht’s phrasing) – may effect that ‘transsubstantiation’ of the substance of simple bread into that of the body of Christ. Just as a very
strong and convincing historical representation may succeed in transforming even the most
hostile facts into its ultimate allies.
But this is only part of the story – and its real intrigue lies elsewhere, namely in the
interaction between the modernist and the Aristotelian conception of form and substance.
Think, again, of Gumbrecht’s claim that the transsubstantation ‘was perfectly plausible to
medieval culture’. It was so plausible then that it hardly needed any comment: it was
sufficient to point out that this was what happened at the Eucharist – and after this had been
done the implications were as simple and unproblematic as when one has pointed out what
route to follow in order to arrive at a certain destination. But this is wholly different with us!
We don’t consider the sacrament of the transsubstantiation to be plausible at all! We think it’s
nonsense, a piece of magical thinking (which it undoubtedly is). And this may deepen our
insight into the notion of ‘presence’. For one might say that for people in the Middle Ages
God was really ‘present’ himself in the Eucharist, but without having ‘presence’.
‘Presence’ only comes into being thanks to paradox and conflict – in this case the
paradox and conflict arising between the Medieval and the modernist, or ‘our’ notion of how
substance and form are related. In sum, for the people in the Middle Ages God was simply
present in the Eucharist in the same way that you are now present to me – and it was the
Aristotelian conception of substance and form which made this possible for the people living
then. But for us, living in the twenty-first century, we can only see what took place in the
mind of our medieval ancestors through the lens of two different and mutully excluding
This was the main argument in my Narrative logic. A semantic analysis of the histiorian’s language, The
Hague/Boston 1983.
34
14
conceptions of how substance and form relate – and then we see something which is simply
miraculous to us. And we will then use this notion of ‘presence’ to do justice to the ‘miracle’
and to an experience of the world that is so strange and alien to us35.
So what this discussion of the Aristotelian view of form and substance (and of how it
conflicts with the modernist view) has made clear, is that ‘presence’ only announces itself in
the fault planes between different historical periods or different discourses: God is simply
present in the Eucharist for the medieval believer, but we, because of this conflict of the
medieval and the modern conception of form and substance have no other choice but to say
that the Eucharist was for the medieval believer an experience of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ is the
right term for characterizing how things must look to us, from our contemporary perspective.
For we are then strangely both inside and outside the Middle Ages: we are inside them since
we have now recognized the ‘presence’ that the Eucharist must have had for the people living
then and that we remained blind to as long as there was, for us, only our conception of form
and substance. But, at the same time we are outside the Middle Ages since we frame their
experience in terms of ‘presence’, whereas for someone living in the Midde Ages God was
merely ‘present’ in the Eucharist. It is as if we can see the past only from the ‘threshold’
between the past and the present – further we cannot go: we cannot actually cross that
threshold – but if we are on this threshold, the past will acquire this aura of ‘presence’.
But in one other respect I would disagree with Gumbrecht. Not coincidentally did I
use a moment ago the writing of history in order to elucidate the Aristotelian conception of
form and substance. In this example of the writing of history, substance is to be associated
with knowledge about the past as expressed in terms of true descriptions of the past.
Obviously, substance does not belong here to the domain of object or of material things. A
true description of the past, or of anything else, has neither weight nor color and we cannot
touch it in the way we can do this with trees and tables. I would, therefore, not go along with
Gumbrecht’s tendency to associate ‘presence’ exclusively with material things and with his
interest for what he refers to as the ‘materialities of communication’36. I think that this is still
too submissive a reaction to the linguistic paradigm that was predominant in the humanities in
the last two decades. It is true, we should try to overcome this paradigm. But we will still
remain unwilling tributaries to it by relating ‘presence’ exclusively to material things. The
linguistic paradigm turned everything it touched into language - so that the more responsible
and commonsensical theorists now started to worry about what had happened to things. And it
then certainly is a step in the right direction to rehabilitate things. But we should make one
further step and make the world of things invade that of language. Language may, under
certain circumstances, assume the ontological status of things37 - and then thinghood has
moved from the domain of things proper to that of language. Consequently, under certain
circumstances language may be an object of experience no different from how things can be
objects of experience38 and the implication is that ‘presence’ need not be associated
exclusively with things, in the way proposed by Gumbrecht.
8. Runia on ‘presence’ and ‘parallel processes’
I shall now turn to a discussion of Eelco Runia’s conception of ‘presence’. I shall begin with
an issue which I think to be of only minor importance. Runia emphasizes the link between
‘presence’ and figures of speech and the importance this link has for a proper understanding
See my Sublime Historical Experience; Chapter 4, especially the discussion of how Burckhardt’s experience
of the past parasitized – and, therefore, presupposed - professionalized historical writing.
36
Gumbrecht, Production of presence; 15.
37
See note 4).
38
This is what I had in mind when proposing the notion of ‘intellectual experience’ and when arguing that the
mind can function as a sense-organ, no less than our eyes, ears etc. See my Sublime Historical Experience;
Introduction.
35
15
of ‘presence’. Here I would fully agree with him. I would have my hesitations, though, when
he primarily thinks here of metonymy, for I would myself focus rather on paradox instead. As
will be clear from what I said about the sublimity of ‘presence’, ‘presence’ really confronts us
with an epistemological paradox and this is why it can have such a dramatic effect on us. I
surmise that metonymy is, in the end, too easy-going and too un-aggressive a trope to bring
this out and that we really need, instead, the shock of paradox and contradiction in order to do
justice to ‘presence’. But this is of no real importance. For both Runia and I associate
‘presence’ with a rupture in our ‘normal’ interactions with reality, with a cognitive impasse
and the sudden awarenes of the insufficiency of the categories in terms of which we normally
make sense of the world. And whether one prefers the trope of metonymy to that of paradox
for expressing this, or vice versa, is a matter of merely subsidiary significance.
Something else in Runia’s recent work is of more importance. This will bring me to
the truly amazing insights into the notion of so-called parallel processes Runia presented in a
recent article that undoubtly will become a classic in historical theory – and, as we shall see in
a moment, which will also send us back again to Nietzsche and to Nietzsche’s views on myth.
As Runia points out, the notion of the parallel-processes:
‘ultimately derives from Freud, who theorized that what is not adequately remembered may be repeated
in the therapeutic situation through unconscious enactment. In a groundbreaking article Harold Searles,
elaborating on Freud’s idea, stated that enactments are not the prerogatives of patients, but occur within
the supervision (that is, in the interaction between therapist and supervisor) as well’ 39.
So the idea is that some problem that has sent a patient to his psychiatrist may not only be ‘reenacted’ by the patient himself in the interaction with his psychiatrist, may may also be
passed on to the psychiatrist and his supervisor. The picture one gets is that of a false coin that
can unproblematically be passed on from one person to another as long as nobody carefully
scrutinizes it. Only if scrutiny has taken place, preferably of course by the patient himself,
then the chain is broken. In his truly fascinating essay Runia transposes the notion to the
domain of history and as the term very ‘re-enactment’ already suggests, after having done so
he compares the parallel process to Collingwood’s renactment theory. For he then goes on to
argue that the parallel process differs ‘in two ways from the Collingwoodian re-enactments:
they do not refer to in vitro representations, but to real – in vivo – interactions; second, they
are not the intended result of a conscious effort but the unintended ripple of subconscious
processes’40.
As an example of how this may actually work in history Runia refers to Arthur
Mitzman’s claim that Michelet had ‘re-enacted’’ in his own life parts of the history of the
French Revolution:
‘in order to narrate the fall from grace of Danton, Michelet orchestrated his own falling from grace.
According to Mitzman, Michelet subconsciously brought himself to a position in which he could be fired
from the Collège de France, dismissed as the head of the Archives, and sent into exile to Nantes – where
he subsequently wrote the famous Danton pages of the Histoire de la Révolution Française41’.
In this way the historian, Michelet, reproduced in his own life the structure of the historical
event he was studying.
The Michelet-example certainly is quite suggestive, but we will need a more
substantial analysis in order to grant credibility to parallel processes in the practice of history.
E. Runia, “Forget about it”: “Parallel processing” in the Srebrenica Report, History and Theory 43 (October
2004); 299
40
Runia, op. cit.; 298, 299
41
Runia, op. cit.; 309
39
16
And precisely this is what Runia gives us in his discussion of the tragedy of the Srebrenica
massacres (where 7,500 Muslims were slaughtered by the Serbs under the nose of a Dutch
UN-battalion) and of how Dutch politics reacted to their involvement in this greatest massmurder in Europe since the Nazi-regime. So the issue here is what happens when a nation
always believing as a matter of course in its moral supremacy (and could afford to do so
thanks to its political insignificance), suddenly has to recognize that it has heaped on itself all
the dirt a nation may gather upon its immersion in grand politics? Surprisingly, although
perhaps not so surprisingly, simply nothing happened right at the beginning. This national
shame was not lengthily and exhaustively discussed in parliament, no political assessment
was made of whom should be held responsible for the tragedy, nor of when, where and by
whom the decisive mistakes had been made. The responsible politicians behaved as if the
Srebrenica drama had taken place in a wholly different galaxy without any ties to their own
cozy little world; they behaved as persons regressing to the innocence of childhood in
reaction to the irruption of an overwhelming reality.
The mechanisms of repression and dissociation worked at top speed. It was arguably
also this mechanism of dissociation which made them take the drama out of an unbearable
present and to relegate it to history, and to try to transform it into something of the past. So
instead of an unsparing and relentless political investgation immediately after the drama, the
whole thing was now handed over to the historians of the Netherlands Institute for War
Documentation (NIOD). Historians were now asked to do what politicians could not and
would not handle themselves.
But, as Runia admirably makes clear in his essay, this would not be the end of it. For
to a truly amazing extent these historians of the NIOD copied the behavior of the politicians
and of the military authorities at Srebrenica. This is why the report written by the NIODhistorians may count as a striking exemplification of parallel-processes in historical writing. I
shall not enumerate all the parallels Runia discovered between what took place in Srebrenica
and The Hague, on the one hand, and how the NIOD-historians dealt with this, on the other,
and shall restrict myself to a few illustrative examples. In the first place there is the parallel
that the Dutch government had decided in favor of military involvement in Bosnia in order to
show that even after 1989 armies are still needed. Similarly, the NIOD had lost its raison
d’être after having completed its work on World War II and the disssolution of the institute
now became a real option. So in both cases a huge operation was taken to give the two
institutions involved, the army and the NIOD, a new lease of life. Next, the NIOD-historians
‘took the same moral high ground as the one from which the Dutch Srebrenica policy had
been conducted’, they copied the governments’ mode of operation, nicely summarized by
Runia in the Napoleonic principle of ‘on s’engage, puis on voit’. Next, the NIOD-researchers
deliberately isolated themselves from the rest of the world, just as the Dutch batallion found
itself in isolation from anyone who could have offered them real support; so both had created,
therefore, their own ‘enclave’. And, lastly, as a result of all this the NIOD researchers
demonstrated the same cornered rat like aggression against anyone daring to challenge their
findings as the political and military authorities themselves, after the dismal proportions of the
drama began to dawn upon everyone42.
But even more telling than all this is the following. The main aim of Dutchbat in
Srebrenica was ‘to deter by presence’ – yes, you heard me correctly: by ‘presence’. The idea
was that the sheer presence of a mere two hundred lightly armed Dutch soldiers would be
enough to keep the Muslims in and the Serbs out. Which proved to be the military
miscalculation of the decade. Now, as Runia most perceptively argued, ‘deterrence by
presence’ also was the subconscious aim the NIOD Report. For on the one hand this Report
comprising with enclosures more than 7,000 densely printed pages registrated almost
42
Runia, op. cit.; 303 – 309.
17
anything that could be registrated with regard to the tragedy, but on the other hand presented
this vast ocean of data in such a way that it was virtually impossible for the reader to make
sense of it. The report consisted, essentially, of a series of individual studies of individual
aspects of the tragedy and though in a final chapter some conclusions were offered, this
chapter had the character of just one more essay rather than of being a judicious synopsis of
the results of these 7,000 pages of historical research. And, here again, the NIOD Report
scrupulously copied real life. For by its size and structure it transformed ‘Srebrenica’ into a
topic unfit for public debate. It effectively barred any further discussion. So, this time at least,
‘deterrence by presence’ was successful43. In this way the NIOD Report copied the
government’s effort to keep the Srebrenica tragedy out of public debate. The government tried
to do so by always insisting that public debate would have to await the publication of the
NIOD Report. And when the Report finally came out, seven years (!) after the event itself, the
Report successfully struck ‘Srebrenica’ from the agenda of public debate by its massive
‘presence’ which prevented any further meaningful interaction between past and present.
Now, I remind the reader that I started this essay by discussing (historical)
representation. So we might well ask ourselves what lessons about ‘presence and
representation’ we may learn from Runia’s analysis of the NIOD Report. In the first place,
we cannot fail to observe that Runia’s parallel processes seem to satisfy what any reasonable
person might expect from representation. If representation is always a ‘making present again’
than this copying of past occurrences seems to give all that representation might ever hope
for. ‘Normally’, in the case of painting or of historical representation, a representation and
the ‘real thing’ represented by it are by no means identical. But here we really got ‘the real
thing’ twice: the NIOD-researchers’s behavior really was the same as that of their principals.
Is that not the best that representation could ever give us?
As we may infer from the foregoing, it becomes clear that we should distinguish
between two conceptions of representation. On the one hand, there is the more common
variant of representation, to be associated with paintings, sculptures, historical representation,
Aristotle’s notion of mimesis – and where representations and what they represent are
categorically different. No sensible person would require a portrait to be identical with its
sitter. But, on the other hand, there is the kind of representation that Runia has made us aware
of and where the representation truly is a repetition, or re-enactment of a previous action, or
perhaps, more generally, of an already existing human artifact. And this is the kind of
representation to be associated with ‘presence’; for, in Runia’s own words ‘presence is the
unrepresented way the past is present in the here and now’44. And, obviously, this is what
happened in the NIOD Report: by copying the behaviour of their political principals the
NIOD historians this behaviour was not so much represented in their Report as carried from
the past into the present.
But there is a complication here. For saying that this copied behaviour remained
‘unrepresented’ in the Report is both true and untrue. It is true in the sense that the NIOD
researchers did not explicitly present this in their Report. On the other hand, it is untrue since
this copied behaviour must somehow have been present in the report - for otherwise Runia
could not have made his discovery. So these two notions of representation are most intricately
entangled in each other. And this raises the question how to distinguish clearly between these
two kinds of representation. When addressing this issue, it must strike us that the former kind
is to be related to human artifacts – a painting, sculpture, historical text, etc. – whereas the
Though the weapons of historical theory proved to be equal to the challenge. Think, firstly, of Runia’s essay
discussed here and see, next, F.R. Ankersmit, a. o. eds., Het drama Srebrenica: Geschiedtheoretische
Beschouwingen over het NIOD-rapport. Special issue of Tijdschrift van Geschiedenis 116 (2003); 185 – 328.
44
See E. Runia …
43
18
other seems to have to do with human actions: the NIOD repeated, in some way or other, the
actions of the Dutch government when getting itself entangled in the Bosnian vespiary.
Now, this is a suggestion that can fruitfully be elaborated. Think again of the Meyer
Schapiro/Nietzsche argument about picture frames expounded above. The gist of the
argument was that the magic of picture frames is that they make us aware that we are
entering an alternative reality when looking at a painting: the semantic function of the picture
frame is to firmly set apart the two dimensional world of the painting from the threedimensional world that we are inhabiting ourselves45.
But all this is different with the second kind of representation: my claim will be that
here we typically miss here the picture frame whose crucial semantic significance was so
much emphasized by Meyer Schapiro/Nietzsche. That is to say, in the second kind of
representation, there is a continuum between the representation and what is represented; the
representation and its represented are part of one and the same reality. This is, of course,
what was so strikingly the case with the NIOD Report: though the NIOD-historians believed
themselves to be the independent and ‘objective’ investigators of what had taken place in
1995 in Srebrenica, they did, in fact, copy all the tactics of repression and of dissociation that
had so strikingly characterized the behavior of their political principals. So what we see here
truly is the very opposite of what Meyer Schapiro/Nietzsche had in mind: instead of firmly
demarcating the domain of the represented and of its representation both domains now flowed
over into each other like two lakes that were united together into one after an earthquake or
some other catastrophical event took away the soil that has separated them.
The primary fact to be observed about this continuum between the represented and its
representation is that one is blind to it: the NIOD-researchers were completely unaware of
these ‘parallel processses’ and of how they had managed to copy in their historical writing, to
a truly amazing extent, the naive innocence of their principals. To put it provocatively, the
NIOD-researchers had historicized everything that could be historicized about the Srebrenica
drama, except the umbilical cord that tied them to their principals. And, more generally, the
lesson to be learned from the NIOD Report is that there often, and perhaps even always, is a
limit to what we succeed in historicizing. And, next, that what we do not succeed to
historicize, is what we are compelled to repeat. As is so well expressed in the old adage, that
whoever is not capable of learning the lessons from the past is compelled to repeat it, i.e. the
past – and to go on doing so until one has finally become prepared to learn these lessons.
9. ‘Presence’ and myth
At the final stage of my argument here, I want to give a somewhat different turn to this issue,
and relate it to myth. Myth always brings us up to the limits of what can be historicized: for
myth informs us how history, the ever-changing historical reality in which we are living now,
arose out of what did not change, of what was still part of nature, in the dramatic sense of that
term, and out of what did not have a history. Myth brings us back to the beginning of
historical time, to that sublime moment when history came into being. Myth is our link to
nature, to what transcends history and time.
Now, obviously, this is the situation in which we will find ourselves when Meyer
Schapiro’s picture frames, for some reason or other, have fallen away. For then the gates
ordinarily separating history from nature have, all of a sudden, been opened, so that nature
may freely invade the domain of history (and, perhaps, vice versa). This, then, is what
By the way, Schapiro’s argument will also add extra ammunition to our attack on the resemblance theory of
representation: since a representation and what is represented by it belong to categorically different realities (as
is demonstrated by the Schapiro argument) it will be clear that the resemblance theory of representation could
not possibly be of any use here. For what criteria of resemblance could there be for how these different realities
should be tied together in, and by representation?
45
19
happened when the NIOD Report was being written: nature, a transhistorical myth of what the
Dutch and the Dutch nation fundamentally is like - decent, nice, cooperative, and without
prejudice against Jews, Muslims or whatever theological or racial denominations you may
have - pushed aside here a historical reality implying a wholly different message.
But this is, probably, too brute a way to put it. The authors of the NIOD Report have, I
think, been no less open to the moral impasses in which the Dutch government and Dutch-bat
had involved itself in Srebrenica. These historians were not offering a bland apology of the
involvement of Dutch-bat in the major catastrophe in Europe since the Nazi-regime. These
people were not kindly glossing over the terrible mistakes that had been made by the Dutch
government and the responsible military authorities: after all, the cabinet guided by Wim Kok
resigned all of a sudden a week after the publication of the NIOD Report (though,
characteristically again, avoiding by this overhasty reaction a discussion of the Report with
parliament).
No, what the NIOD-researchers were, and remained blind to is not all that had
happened in Srebrenica – they knew about this better then anybody else will ever (care to)
know. The issue is, rather, that their copying of the behavior of the government demonstrated
that there was a limit to what they succeeded in historicizing. For what the Report ultimately
and unintentionally did was to try to perpetuate the myth of the Dutch as a sensible, decent
and fundamentally well-intentioned nation. That was the action performed by the NIOD
researches and that they had copied from their principals in a ‘parallel process’. The NIOD
Report historicized everything that could be historicized about the Srebrenica drama except
this, except this myth. In his Geburt der Tragödie – discussed above – Nietzsche presented a
most penetrating insight into this relationship between myth and the resistence to
historicization:
‘worauf weist das ungeheure historische Bedürfnis der unbefriedigten modernen Kultur, das
Umsichsammeln zahhloser anderer Kulturen, das verzehrende Erkennenwollen, wenn nicht auf den
Verlust des Mythus, auf den Verlust der mythischen Heimat, des mythischen Mutterschosses? Man frage
sich, ob das fieberhafte und so unheimliche Sichregen dieser Kutlur etas anderes ist als das gierige
Zugreifen und Nach-Nahrung-Haschen des Hungernden – und wer möchte einer solchen Kultur noch
etwas geben wollen, die durch alles, was sie verschlingt, nicht zu sättigen ist, und bei deren Berührung
sich die kräftigste, heilsamste Nahrung in ‘Historie und Kritik’ zu verwandeln pflegt?’.
Or, as I have expressed it myself elsewhere, when the urge of historicization is highest, when
we truly wish to get to the bottom of things by historicization, when Benjamin’s storms from
paradise46 have achieved their greatest strenghts, when we reall get to the eye of the hurricane
of historicization, we will find ourselves in a pre- or transhistorical myth47.
One last issue will demand our attention. Recall Nietzsche’s argument that the tragic
chorus functions as a wall (‘Mauer’) between the audience and what happens on the scene. At
first sight this seems to be at odds with what I have been saying just now about this continuity
between the representation of actions and the action of representation which is the hallmark of
the parallel processes and where the ‘picture-frame’, normally separating representational
‘Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heisst. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als wäre er
im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen,
und seine Flügel sind aufgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muss so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der
Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige
Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füsse schleudert. Er möchte wohl
verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradies her, der
sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, dass der Engel sie nicht mehr schliessen kann. Dieser Sturm
treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum
Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm’. See W. Benjamin,
Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen, IX)
47
See my Sublime Historical Experience; 365, 368.
46
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space from ordinary three-dimensional space, is absent. What is right and wrong in this
objection becomes clear if we introduce the notion of what I would like to call ‘the
representational urge’. And I would define this representational urge as the desire and
aspiration inherent in all representation to objectify the world, the represented as well as
possible. That is to say, each representation always aims at hiding its origins, at wiping out all
that might relate it to its creator. Needless to say, historians are well acquainted with this
representational urge: it is known in the discipline as the old and venerable requirement of
‘objectivity’.
But there inevitably is a limit to this urge – and that we can locate, in agreement with
foregoing, in the representational ‘picture frame’. Around each representation, whether
painting, sculpture or historical text, is a real or imaginary picture frame demarcating
representational space from ordinary space48. The representational urge always wishes to
make us forget about this picture frame, to provoke, somehow, the illusion of its ‘absence’
(indeed, the opposite of ‘presence’ as discussed in this essay). And then (the illusion of) a
merger of the represented and its representation, of the world and its artificial counterpart,
comes into being.
Now, the crucial thing is to recognize that this representational urge has the
paradoxical effect of being self-defeating. For, on the one hand, it urges us to create as much
continuity as possible between real space and representional space: the more continuity we
have here, the more real, and the more ‘objective’ our reprsesentations must seem to us. But,
on the other hand, forgetting about this difference between real and representational space is,
of course, a standing invitation to the intrusion of the domain of the subject (representation)
into that of the object (the world, the represented). To put it in terms familiar to the historian,
the more scrupulously objective the historian is, the more painfully will he be aware of the
inexorable ‘presence’ of the picture frame, of this unyielding wall (‘Mauer’) between himself
and the past, and, hence, of his subjectivity.
This may also clarify the exact character of the parallel process. For it is not hard to
define the nature of this wall, or ‘Mauer’; namely, the wall or ‘Mauer’ that representation will
never succeed in overcoming is that between actions represented and the action of
representation. And we may infer from this that precisely the strongest representational urge,
the strongest effort at ‘objectivity’ must necessarily drive representation towards a continuity
between the representation of actions and the action of representation, and, hence, towards the
parallel process. For this truly is the last obstacle to be overcome in the never ending struggle
for objectivity. But, unfortunately, at the same time, it is a matter of simple logic that this
wall, or ‘Mauer’, can never be overcome. In sum, on the one hand it is true that my argument
about the continuity between representation and its represented is at odds with Nietzsche’s
claim of the wall, or ‘Mauer’ separating audience from the scene and, hence representation
from the represented. But, on the other, precisely the effort to realize this continuity will
sooner or later make us run up against Nietzsche’s wall, or ‘Mauer’, so inexorably separating
the representation from its represented. And, to put not too fine a point on it, this will happen
‘later’ rather than ‘sooner’. For this wall only manifest itself after all has been done to achieve
‘objectivity’ and when all has been done in the name of historiciziation that could be done.
This, then, also demonstrates why myth is to be found at the end, rather then at the
beginning of all historical writing (though it is also present at its beginning, no doubt about
that, of course!). Once again the parallel process, as expounded by Runia, is illuminating
here. For, as we saw just how, the most sustained effort at historical objectivity that had
motivated the historians of then NIOD Report made them finally run up against Nietzsche’s
wall, and in their encounter with this wall they starded to copy the actions of the agents they
had investigated. The representation of action was now effectively transformed in the action
48
See my History and Tropology, Berkeley 1994, chapter 5.
21
of representation. The past is now carried over into the present, like a ‘stowaway’, to use
Runia’s own memorable metaphor49.
But precisely this transformation makes us aware of the blind spot of the NIOD
Report: they started to behave in the same way as their principals but without being aware of
this and of what made them copy their principals. This blind spot we had best characterize as
the report’s myth: for we have to do with myth when the past determines our actions while, at
the same time we cannot objectify what makes us do so. The blind spot is the myth lying at
the origin of the subconscious beliefs and convictions of a civilization, a nation or an
institution. It is the ‘cold heart’, as I once called it, of a civilization, nation or institution50.
Finally, in agreement with what has been said, I would not hesitate to closely relate
myth and ‘presence’ - and the term ‘myth’ is taken here not in the traditional sense of that
word, but understood rather as what a civilization, nation etc. never succeeds in properly
objectifying when thinking about itself and its past. Because of this, myth incarnates the
parallel processes of civilizations, nations etc. and, hence, where actions represented will
continuously repeat themselves in the action of representation. ‘Presence’ is an appropriate
term for referring to this stubborn persistence of the past and where it remains a ‘presence’ in
the present. In this way myth also can give meaning to ‘presence’, that is to say, suggest
where we may expect to find ‘presence’ in a civilization’s cultural repertoire. But when
speaking about the meaning of ‘presence’, I have in mind the meaning of the notion and do
not wish to imply by this that ‘presence’ itself, I mean as a concrete historical or cultural
phenomenon, should have a meaning itself. For getting hold of this meaning is just as
impossible as jumping over one’s own shadow; meaning always successfully evades our
grasp. That is its sublimity. So I wholly agree, again, with Gumbrecht when saying that
‘presence’ gives us ‘what meaning cannot convey’. Nevertheless, the urge to get hold of this
meaning is irresistible – and this is why we can easily get caught by this loop of ‘presence’,
so that it may remain with us indefinitely. And that is, again, another meaning we may give to
‘presence’.
10. Conclusion
‘Presence’ is a new word in the theoretical reflection on the humanities. It does not have a
meaning that we can all be required to accept, if we wish to be admitted to the arena of
theoretical debate. So nobody can dictate to us what meaning we should give to the term. It is
a typically ‘democratic’ term in the sense that anybody may do with it what he or she likes.
Decisive is only whether one’s use of the term is useful and fruitful and whether it may offer
new prospects in philosophy and in the reflection in the humanities. Looking at it from this
perspective, I am convinced that this really is the kind of notion we presently need more than
anything else. For the lingualism of philosophy of language, of hermeneutics, of
deconstructivism, of tropology, of semiotics etc. has become by now an obstacle to, rather
than a promotor of useful and fruitful insights. The mantra’s of this now so oppressive and
suffocating lingualism have become a serious threat to the intellectual health of our discipline.
But revolutions that forget what preceded them prove often to be less effective than
their instigators had hoped for. So what we need are, so to speak, conservative revolutions.
That is to say, revolutions that are very much aware of why an ancien regime made a
revolution necessary and inevitable and that define their raison d’être in terms of this
necessity. So it is in the sciences. Scientific revolutions are not attempts to start from scratch
again, but always jusitify their inevitability by carefully explaining the shortcomings of the
ancien regime. And so it is here as well, I believe. We can only get to a new world and a new
49
50
Runia, ….
see my Sublime Historical Experience; 367, 368.
22
dispensation in our discipline after a dispassionate and careful scrutiny of a previous
dispensation. Otherwise, we run the risk of falling victim ourselves to a parallel process.
In this essay I have attempted to satisfy this demand by taking my point of departure in
the notion of representation. And then, for better or for worse, my argument has been that we
had best define ‘presence’ in continuation and in opposition to representation. If only because
I hope, and expect, that this will provoke controversy. For this is, in the end, the only thing
that really counts.
Frank Ankersmit
Groningen University
23