3
The Reduction to History

New Confrontations with Time and History

The sequence of ideas from Vico to Dilthey fed into a wider cultural tendency to think in terms of change, evolution, or development by the later nineteenth century. It had come to seem, as never before in the West, that human beings are fundamentally caught up in time or history, even that "reality" itself is somehow temporal or historical. During the later nineteenth century, the metaphysical tradition, recast through the various forms of developmentalism, seemed able to encompass this new sense of things. But by the end of the century, the intrusiveness of time and history was forcing a more radical rethinking. Some sought a new means of access to the suprahistorical, while others moved in the opposite direction, taking change, time, novelty, and creativity as ultimately real. But attempts to explore the human situation on this latter basis led in radically different directions, which have not been adequately distinguished. Thus a brief sketch is essential to grasp the novelty of the common departure that we find in Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger.

The effort to transcend the realm of change and novelty had been central to the Western metaphysical tradition, but it became more single-minded in light of the newly intrusive historicizing tendency. To an array of thinkers by the early twentieth century, the reconquest of the suprahistorical realm had come to seem the major cultural priority. Thus, for example, the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert responded to the troubling diversity of historically specific value systems by positing a transcendent value realm that somehow makes possible the diverse value manifestations of the empirical world. But the most influential

of these efforts were Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and the structuralism that grew out of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics.

By means of a newly rigorous phenomenology, Husserl sought a grounding for certainty, for knowledge independent of history, society, and even the contingent construction of the human psyche, mind, or brain.^[1] He worried, then, not only about historicism but also about psychologism, or the reduction of logic and the categories of thought to the structures of the human psyche. In a sense, however, psychologism seemed so threatening only because of the broader historicist tendency, only because the mental equipment of human beings no longer seemed universal and suprahistorical, but rather to have come to be as it is in response to particular circumstances, as a contingent product of evolution in time. The package of historicism and psychologism threatened to make knowledge merely relative and thus to breed skepticism—and even, Husserl feared, some general crisis of Western civilization.^[2]

At the outset of modern philosophy, Descartes had similarly sought to ward off skepticism, as had Kant, in a more sophisticated way, in response to the new skepticism of David Hume. But those efforts had come to seem inadequate, so Husserl sought a more radical approach, eschewing the presuppositions that still lurked in the thinking of his predecessors. By bracketing any notion of an actively thinking subject or an external world, any notion that what is found in consciousness refers to something else, by concentrating only on the phenomena that appeared in consciousness, Husserl thought it possible to isolate the necessary and indubitable structures of experience. Starting from the "transcendental ego" or purified consciousness that he believed resulted from this reduction, he sought to show that consciousness does not simply identify but confers meaning and that essences, not simply individual things, appear to consciousness. To head off solipsism, he posited intersubjectivity; only in community with others can I claim to know the world.^[3]

Husserl's effort was intriguing, but critics ever since have noted its inadequacies. The attempt to bracket has seemed futile, a kind of desperate last gasp, especially because the meaning of phenomena appears in language, a historical and culturally specific product. As Leszek Kolakowski has put it, "While performing the transcendental reduction, we cannot get rid of language, and this means: of the whole cultural history of mankind."^[4] Moreover, for Husserl, the particular instances are not the real focus of interest but point to essences, assumed to be given once and for all. But any such essences may be only

[1] Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 17–23, 34–35.

[2] Husserl's most explicit assault on historicism is his "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" (1910), reprinted in his Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy , trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, Torchbook, 1965). See pp. 77–79, 122–147.

[3] Kolakowski, Husserl , 40, 61, 65, 73–77.

[4] Ibid., 55–56.

provisional summations of particulars so far, which we divide up and arrange in certain ways for certain contingent purposes. And the accent on intersubjectivity suggested that knowing might be a temporal process—and endlessly provisional.

The difficulties with Husserl's approach helped convince others, most obviously Heidegger and Derrida, that any such quest for timeless certainty was misguided. It was partly in response to Husserl that Heidegger sought to encompass the historicity of human being in Being and Time , published in 1927, then took another step and began focusing on the historicity of being itself. Husserl sought to keep up, writing The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936–1937) partly in response to Heidegger's initial turn. In this work, which remained unfinished on his death, Husserl fully recognized that historical self-reflection permeates the transcendental reduction; there is always an a priori "life world." Yet even as he admitted this element of variability and relativity, he continued to struggle to posit something suprahistorical.^[5] There is something universal about the way any life world works, and we can get at that universal structure. Indeed, the life world can be the subject of a universalizing science.^[6] And in light of the crisis Husserl believed to be developing, such a universal science, however abstract its object, was more than ever the cultural priority.

Much like Husserl at about the same time, the linguist Saussure found history so intrusive that it had to be precluded in a newly radical way if knowledge according to the broadly Cartesian ideal was to be possible. Finding inadequate the recent efforts to understand change in language in terms of development within a stable system, he reworked the relationship between the phenomenon of linguistic change and the element of system that might afford the focus for a secure science. Change comes from outside the linguistic system, from the actual use of language, which cannot be understood in specifically linguistic terms at all.^[7] The actual use of language, Saussure was implicitly suggesting, was at least sometimes fundamentally creative. Any such use might change language in a way that could not have been predicted beforehand. So the use of language and change in language were bound up with a process of change over time, with history, and could not be captured in scientific knowledge.

But by writing off that diachronic dimension, Saussure decided, it would be

[5] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy , trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). See also David Carr's sympathetic exposition, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), which features the tension between Husserl's continuing attempt at a transcendental orientation and his effort "to take history seriously."

[6] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics , trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977), 190–196. See also pp. 158–164, 167–168.

[7] Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (New York: Penguin, 1977), 22–41, esp. pp. 36–37.

possible to identify the structure of language at any one time, the system of relations and rules making possible any actual use of the language. He could posit such a system because he assumed a radical dichotomy of sign and signified; the structure was a self-contained system of relationships among the signs and did not depend on some relationship with the changing "outside" world. On the basis of this synchronic dimension, it would be possible to develop a science first of language, then of human cultural expression in general, laying bare the structure of the system and showing how it works, how meaning is generated by the operations of the elements in the system.

But a science of this sort was in one sense thin, eviscerated. Although a stable structure can be delineated at any one moment, change continues, and every subtle innovation in actual usage forces into being a subtly different system at the next moment in time. The linguistic system has to adjust to endless innovation; the science is perpetually swallowed up by history.^[8]

Structuralism began to emerge in the late 1940s as Claude Lévi-Strauss sought to draw out Saussure's insights to develop a full-scale science of culture. Suggesting that the basic structure of language underlies an array of societal practices, Lévi-Strauss focused strictly on the signs in an effort to discern the underlying system, the gridwork of rules that enables the signs to have meaning and that, in a sense, makes possible whatever happens. A science of human being is possible, said Lévi-Strauss in 1949, precisely because we can apprehend the structure underlying the changing cultural phenomena of history.

Anthropology cannot remain indifferent to historical processes and to the most highly conscious expressions of social phenomena. But if the anthropologist brings to them the same scrupulous attention as the historian, it is in order to eliminate, by a kind of backward course, all that they owe to the historical process and to conscious thought. His goal is to grasp, beyond the conscious and always shifting images which men hold, the complete range of unconscious possibilities. These are not unlimited, and the relationships of compatibility or incompatibility which each maintains with all the others provide a logical framework for historical developments, which, while perhaps unpredictable, are never arbitrary.^[9]

As history inflated, it seemed essential to Lévi-Strauss to find something suprahistorical that could be known definitively, even if it proved to lie on this

[8] See Derek Attridge, "Language as History/History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of Etymology," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Derek Attridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 183–211, on the strains in Saussure's own text that resist the effort to fashion a synchronic, suprahistorical science of language. Saussure's story betrays its own rhetoricity especially where etymology is at issue; a sense of the historicity even of the key terms undermines any possibility of mastery, of getting it right. Attridge concludes that Saussure can be read either as an essentialist scientist or as a proto-poststructuralist who points the way to a deconstructive political and cultural praxis. See esp. pp. 202–204.

[9] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology , trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 23 (1949).

highly abstract level of rules, or patterns of relationships: "the effort to find a deeper and truer reality behind the multiplicity of apparent realities, that seems to me to be the condition of survival for the human sciences."^[10]

Structuralism is widely viewed as the culmination of the modern quest for a suprahistorical science of human culture, based on the assumption that even the human sphere stems from something stable and in some sense natural. Indeed, structuralism has seemed the last gasp of that quest—before the whole enterprise turned on itself, collapsing into poststructuralism. Poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida argued that though structuralism assumed it could view the human world from the outside, it was doing so from the inside, especially because it too was caught up in language and thus was trapped in its own characteristic modes of discourse. The sort of closed system structuralism envisioned was impossible; something keeps sticking out, eluding the attempt to fit everything together.

Concern to isolate something stable and certain that transcends history has been an enduring theme in twentieth-century thought. But the sense that time, change, novelty, and creativity had not gotten their due led other early twentieth-century thinkers in something like the opposite direction. If a metaphysics of being, givenness, or foundations no longer seemed to hold, the alternative might be to posit reality as something like flow or process or evolution.

The most influential of those exploring this direction was the French thinker Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who enjoyed a particular vogue between the publication of his Creative Evolution in 1907 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914. Like his near-contemporary Husserl, Bergson was "Cartesian" in the sense of bracketing the everyday world in an effort to concentrate on inner experience, or pure consciousness; only there, it seemed, could a kind of certainty be found. But Bergson thought it essential to embrace precisely what Husserl was determined to resist—dissolution into the flow of time.

Participating in the wider pragmatic move, Bergson bought the notion that mind is a practical organ, a tool for living. In our practical way of dealing with the world, it is useful—indeed, essential—that we divide the world up into discrete events and objects, that we conceive events as repeatable, that we posit stable "things" that are what they are. But the practical orientation has led us to a limiting metaphysics, which conceives stable essences as higher, more real than variable individual instances and which leads us to believe we can subsume whatever we encounter within stable categories. Indeed, those assumptions inform language itself, which is ultimately practical, mechanical.

We apprehend the deeper truth of things insofar as we turn from practical needs and linguistic categories and, through a kind of intuition, apprehend our

[10] Quoted in Sanche de Gramont, "There Are No Superior Societies," in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero , ed. E. N. Hayes and Tanya Hayes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), 18.

own consciousness. We thereby gain access to a certain experience of time—not time that might be divided up, segmented, and measured, but real time, pure duration (durée ). In this mode we experience not timelessness but perfect continuity, bound up with continuing memory, which is essential to the continuity of the self.^[11] But in turning inward to experience durée, we also grasp change, novelty, creativity, freedom, and individuality, all of which the practical orientation leads us to deny through reduction to stable categories. In this mode of intuition, in fact, we have immediate access to the élan vital, the eternally creative life force—which is much like God.^[12]

By starting with this inward experience, we can shake free of traditional metaphysics, with its emphasis on discrete events and objects, on stable "things" related in a mechanistic way. Rather than assume that movement requires a prior moving thing, we understand that movement is real; things are temporary crystallizations.^[13] Time and novelty, or creativity, are two sides of the same coin: because there is creativity, time is generated; because time is real, there is genuine creativity. And individuality is bound up with the reality of time because novelty and creativity mean that things and events are unrepeatable, unique.

Bergson might have focused on the actual world that endlessly results from the totality of human creativity and that affords a particular content to public time, or history. Instead, however, he insisted on the radical disparity between the durée accessible through intuition and the apprehension of that public world though historical inquiry. By implication, we understand history in a practical, deterministic mode. Historical inquiry remains necessary for practical orientation, but we gain access to the deeper reality of things by turning inward, away from the public historical world. So even as he sought to take time and motion seriously as never before, Bergson did not find it necessary to take history, the actual chain of particular events over time, seriously in the same way. As we will see below, it was especially at this point that Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger diverged, for they experienced the weight of that actual historical world in a way that Bergson did not.

With his premium on inwardness, Bergson opened the way to a new religiosity, encompassing a form of mysticism. He insisted on the special value of the mystics in our tradition and noted his own kinship with William James, who was similarly seeking to specify the forms of religious experience that

[11] Leszek Kolakowski, Bergson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 15–16, 24–25. See also Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 21–31.

[12] Kolakowski, Bergson , 21, 25, 34, 46–47, 70, 73. See also Theodore Ziolkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1969), 210–211, 213.

[13] Kolakowski, Bergson , 2, 45, 95–96.

become possible in a generally pragmatist world.^[14] At the same time, Bergson was at least pointing to a new suprahistorical metaphysics, a statement of what reality is. At last we might get it right—once and for all. His thinking helped inspire the "process philosophy" of the later Alfred North Whitehead, who similarly sought to reconcile continuity with novelty. Like Bergson, Whitehead started by taking events to be logically and metaphysically prior to objects; events were real, and objects depend on them—not the other way around.^[15] And Bergson's sense of the whole as creative evolution accessible to human intuition pointed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's optimistic evolutionary cosmology.

Whether we accent mysticism or a new metaphysics of process, the outcome of Bergson's effort to jettison traditional metaphysics was relatively conventional. The tradition we will follow, starting with Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger, was more radical because it explicitly eschewed emphases like Bergson's.^[16]

Precisely as Husserl, Saussure, and Bergson were writing, the growing pre-occupation with time and history affected literature, occasioning a number of the defining themes of early modernism. Bergson was himself influential, but in turning inward to focus on subjective consciousness, the early modernist writers encountered a domain of experience that he did not explore. For what we seem first to encounter, when we turn inward, is neither a universal nor a purely personal realm but a particular historical legacy lacking necessity or strong justification. The modernists explored the modes of experience and response that became possible as the historical inflated. We can better grasp the stakes of the cultural break at issue if we look briefly at a few aspects of that modernist exploration, which make clear how deeply individual experience was implicated in the inflation of history. Experience of a merely historical world could entail a suffocating sense of confinement or a giddy sense of lightness; in response the individual might seek authenticity in opposition to the historical legacy, or aesthetic satisfaction in ordering the historical bits and pieces, or a renewed sense of oneness even in the face of the fragmentation and contingency that seemed to characterize a merely historical world.

Michel, the protagonist of André Gide's The Immoralist (1902), begins as a conventional historian, but he comes to understand history as layer upon layer of mere convention that covers over the authentic self he feels smoldering within him. At first his effort to peel away those layers encompasses redoing the inherited historical account, which buttresses a certain conventional mode of being but which had stemmed from merely contingent needs and desires at

[14] See especially Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion , trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt, 1935; orig. French ed. 1932).

[15] See also Kolakowski, Bergson , 45, 101.

[16] See, for example, Schwartz's lucid discussion of the difference between Bergson and Nietzsche in The Matrix of Modernism , 36–39.

work in his culture. By forging a different history, connecting with hidden dimensions of the past—such as the experience of the young Gothic king Athalaric—Michel could apprehend hidden aspects of himself. But Michel ultimately decides that authenticity, creativity, and fully lived experience require turning from any concern with the past, any mode of historical consciousness.^[17]

In The Man without Qualities , Robert Musil explored the uncanniness that creeps into individual experience in a world that has no more substance than the historical. Ulrich, Musil's protagonist, is initially willing to let "himself be shaped by the external circumstances of life" through immersion in his historically specific context and tradition.^[18] He lets others furnish his house, for example, to provide the essential connection—and limitation. But though he understood some sense of belonging to be essential, Ulrich found the relationship between the personal and the historical to be tension-ridden and ambiguous. In one sense, the historically specific culture was deeply confining, even a straitjacket, yet in another the historical world enveloping us is shallow, lacking necessity. Ulrich has caught on to the contingency and arbitrariness of it all; if the individual "is told that something is the way it is, then he thinks: Well it could probably just as easily be some other way." And this sense engenders "the capacity . . . to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not."^[19] Thus, Ulrich manages what J. M. Coetzee has called "a certain reserve toward the real world, a living sense of alternative possibilities."^[20]

But that sense does not invite commitment toward the future in a world that has come to seem light and insubstantial. Ulrich understands that for no good reason, one may connect or fail to connect with the motion of the particular world. The individual may send out ideas in all directions, "but only what produces resonance in his environment will radiate back to him and condense, whereas all the other messages are scattered in space and lost."^[21] Suspended between past and future, Ulrich lives disengaged, uncommitted, hovering in "a web of haze, imaginings, fantasy and the subjunctive mode."^[22]

Musil suggests that this sense of lightness emerged especially in "Kakania"—late imperial Austria. There

one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one's existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all that had not happened, or at least

[17] André Gide, The Immoralist , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Vintage, 1970), esp. pp. 50-53, 65-66, 145-146.

[18] Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities , vol. 1, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (1930) (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Perigee, 1980), 17. See also p. 31, on the experience of being caught up in a moving world.

[19] Ibid., 12, 34. See also pp. 64–65.

[20] J. M. Coetzee, "On the Edge of Revelation," New York Review of Books , 18 December 1986, 10.

[21] Musil, The Man without Qualities , 64–65, 134. Musil also remarks that "at times [Ulrich] felt just as though he had been born with a gift for which at present there was no function" (p. 65).

[22] Ibid., 12. See also pp. 15–17, 70.

had not yet irrevocably happened. . . Es ist passiert , "it just sort of happened," people said there. . . . It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself.^[23]

This is the lightness of the merely historical world. And though Musil suggested that it was experienced first in this particular context, he found it central to the modern cultural situation in general. That situation breeds a particular type, the "man without qualities," approaching the world through irony.

But there might be other ways of coming to terms with a world that seemed at once stifling and insubstantial as the historical inflated. In his famous essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot betrayed a concern for individuality and creativity in the face of an overwhelming tradition. Yet precisely because the past impinged on the present individual merely as bits and pieces, arbitrarily connected through the conventional historical account to which we have fallen heir, it could be confronted in a newly creative way. So rather than disengage and turn inward or settle for mere self-assertion, Eliot sought to confront the world as historical head on, making it his own by ordering the bits and pieces in an overtly aestheticist way.^[24] To be sure, it "requires a ridiculous amount of erudition," as he put it elsewhere, to encompass the entire past as present, yet he yearned for precisely that wholeness, for "the only real truth is the whole truth." In The Waste Land (1922) he added reference upon reference, juxtaposing points of view, letting one character melt into another, in order to build the most comprehensive whole he could.^[25] 00

For Eliot, however, there was something terrifying about the growing sense that the world can have nothing but a merely contingent human ordering. In "The Dry Salvages" (1943), he refers to

The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.^[26]

We grasp that "recorded history" is only a flimsy human contrivance, a merely historical way of connecting ourselves to the whole. It keeps us only intermittently from the primitive, terrifying sense that our world of historical bits and

[23] Ibid., 34.

[24] T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 37–44. See also Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism , 181–183, 186–187.

[25] Both passages quoted in James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 174, 200. See also pp. 202, 205-207, on Eliot's "yearning for the whole truth."

[26] T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971; orig. pub. 1943), 39, lines 101–103.

pieces is fundamentally meaningless. Thus we cannot suppress "the backward half-look."

And for Eliot, in the final analysis, the satisfaction to be gained by self-consciously ordering fragments from the past did not in itself afford an antidote. By means of art, however, it might be possible to see through the fragments to the source of things or the totality of things, to achieve a species of mystical or visionary experience. James Longenbach notes that in Eliot's The Waste Land , "a primitive revelation of 'the whole truth' (the thunderous 'DA') is disseminated, by the process of tradition, throughout history."^[27] Faith is bound up with this capacity to grasp the whole, to apprehend a divine revelation coming down through the whole tradition.

Eliot's remarkable exploration of the temporal and historical dimensions of personal experience in his Four Quartets led him to envision a level of timelessness, perhaps even a level prior to the bifurcation of temporal and timeless. Near the end of "The Dry Salvages," he contrasts our ongoing need to probe past and future with the "hints followed by guesses" that accompany our intimations of timelessness:

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled.^[28]

With the eruption of time and history, the bifurcation of temporal and timeless became more deeply problematic, leading Eliot to recast "Incarnation" itself as the overcoming or dissolution of precisely those problems. We understand traditional religious categories afresh, as the antidote to the new sense of fragmentation, irony, and primitive terror resulting from the modern break in historical consciousness.

The modernists' preoccupation with history was deeply symptomatic, but their divergent explorations left an array of open questions. Even if we assume that history is but a contingent overlay hiding some authentic self, how might that self be extricated, and what mode of life is appropriate to it in the public, merely historical world? Gide's Michel ends up tormented by his "useless freedom." His friends wonder if he will manage to reconnect with his own time and find a productive social role. For Gide, that question is central, but he provides no answer.^[29]

[27] Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History , 227.

[28] Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," 44, lines 214–219. See also Helen Gardner, The Composition of "Four Quartets" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 57–58, 145–147.

[29] Gide, The Immoralist , 3, 169.

Musil's Ulrich is comparable to Michel in seeking access to what is repressed, hidden, or held back as culture develops. And for him, as for Michel, what has been hidden is in some sense sexual, even in some sense evil. But is this hidden dimension historically variable and specific or always the same? If Ulrich is confronting the mechanisms of his particular culture, is there scope for historical inquiry to gain access to what had been hidden? Musil leaves us to wrestle with the relationships among art, science, history, and the conditions of ethical response, forcing us to recognize that our ways of doing so are themselves historically specific.^[30]

Eliot's response betrayed some tension between the visionary artist, seeking wholeness, and the critic, aware of the historicity and finitude of any such quest.^[31] He noted that life is always turned toward creation, which, in fact, is the present "interest" that enables us to bring the past to life. But he did not fully confront the sense in which any way of creatively apprehending the "entire past," even his own, might be finite, historically specific, and itself particularizing.

This Particular World

Like Bergson and the literary modernists, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger sought to rethink the human situation on the basis of becoming, time, or history. But a common element in their way of conceiving—and experiencing—the intrusiveness of history set them off from their contemporaries. After a point, however, they too diverged, and their responses differed radically.

Although the recognition of change, motion, or becoming meant that things could no longer be conceived simply as what they are, it was crucial for Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger that the world does not simply fly apart, or collapse in a heap. Each posited a postmetaphysical, purely horizontal kind of continuity. Earlier and later, before and after, still matter; indeed, we are what we are as a result of what has come before us, and in responding as we do to the particular present situation, we participate in the coming to be of what comes after us. We are influenced, and we influence in turn. These simple postulates afforded the coherence and continuity necessary to conceive what "there is" as history, at least as a first approximation.

What mattered for all three thinkers was that some particular world is endlessly coming to be, over time. Nietzsche's assault on metaphysical notions of stable being left only sheer becoming, but becoming is not empty. Something in particular is endlessly coming to be. With the possible exception of will to power, nothing simply "is" but rather everything has become, has resulted from

[30] David Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880–1942 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980), 216–217.

[31] In developing this point, I have profited particularly from Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History , 209, 220–221, 237.

something else. While Saussure was bracketing the unruly diachronic in order to make possible a synchronic science of language, Croce accented the endless novelty and creativity that make language change and grow. What ultimately matters is the diachronic dimension, the actual world being built up through such creative response in language. In a parallel way, Heidegger concluded that it was not radical enough simply to incorporate historicity into the sort of phenomenology Husserl had done. Rather, it was necessary to conceive what "there is" as "eventing," happening, or coming to be.

So Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger were embracing something like a reduction to history, but this was not simply to flip-flop, saying that instead of "given" foundations or essences, what "there is" is history. "History" was not an answer, which might take the cultural place of the old metaphysical answers, but a new set of questions, even a new mode of questioning. What especially demanded attention were the implications of the inflating historical for the range of personal experience.

To experience the world as historical entailed, first, a sense of the utter finitude of the world. As we come to believe that, on every level, the world is as it is only because it has become what it is, we feel the weight of the bland notion that the world is forever becoming some particular way, as opposed to other ways that it might have become. From this perspective, even our particular science, or apprehension of nature, has resulted historically, as a function of the historically specific questions we have asked.

This sense of particularity and finitude carried such weight because postmetaphysical connectedness entailed contingency; any historical outcome, including our own, might be conceived as idiosyncratic, even a billion-to-one fluke. A particular world results—apparently endlessly results—from history, yet this world has nothing necessary about it. Although Heidegger would come to speak of "destiny," we will see that a sense of the uncanny particularity of things was fundamental even to him.

If we insist on thinking in terms of a beginning, it is more like Vico's than Hegel's. History does not start with logos, some potential for wholeness, some way things "are" on some level. The beginning does not afford direction, imply an end, and thus tell us what we might do, or make of ourselves, so that what we "really" are will ultimately stand revealed as the resultant of the process itself. The beginning is simply the initiation of an open but particularizing process. Rather than a logos, or form to be filled, we must imagine a situation of dumb brutes starting from scratch, "knowing" only their own bodies, on the basis of which they can only respond as best they can, once such a response is suddenly demanded. Each response creates a new situation eliciting a new response.

But particularity does not preclude totality. At each moment, a thick but still finite interweaving of particular individualities constitutes a totality; and this particular world, this provisional resulting of the particularities so far, is all

there is. Thus even the totality is individual—some particular way. With Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger, the broadly historicist current in our tradition became totalizing again, after the individualizing reaction against Hegel. But what each of them posited was a "weak," post-Hegelian kind of totality, radically contingent, lacking any suprahistorical frame or goal, and thus ever provisional and incomplete. Each sought to think through what happens to individual experience when the totality that encompasses and survives the individual comes to seem merely finite, provisional, and weak.

For Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger, then, experience of the eclipse of metaphysics led to a sense that we are caught up in, that we belong to, a particular total event, this event. My being cannot be separated from the actual present world, which is the resultant of the totality of history so far and which, unstable and tension-ridden, is endlessly being remade through the responses of present individuals, including me.

The notion of weak totality has been hard to grasp because earlier ways of understanding totality and individuality have continued to dominate the discussion. As a result, students of the period often lump together thinkers—Dilthey, Bergson, and Croce, for example—who should be distinguished. Some assume that Marxism must be central to any consideration of "totality" and history. Yet Marxian totalism remained relatively strong and teleological, so preoccupation with Marxian categories has made it difficult to think through the weak alternative. But unless we grasp the weak totalist way of conceiving the world as historical that we find in Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger, we cannot adequately characterize the cultural possibilities that opened with the waning of metaphysics.

History, Language, and Individual Experience

The assault on the metaphysical tradition rendered ever more problematic the notion that mind, thinking, or language connects with a distinguishable object, or outside world. Language, especially, had seemed to provide the necessary bridge between subject and object; it was a neutral medium or transparent window allowing representation of "nature," the world that existed independently of us. As notions of mirroring or representation were undermined, language became a problem; it was either too embedded or too abstract to bridge the gap any longer.

With the loosely pragmatist move, to be sure, language came to seem natural, immanent—and effective for practical purposes. But it was so merely relative to our contingent needs and questions as to cut us off from the way things really are, independently of us. This was unnerving, though there might be antidotes. For Bergson, language was a practical tool that, by abstracting, cuts us off from the deeper reality of things, but precisely as we grasp the limits of lan-

guage we begin to see how to apprehend that deeper reality in a direct, nonlinguistic way. Others went in the opposite direction and developed a science of culture—semiotics or structuralism—that claimed to lay bare the underlying system of rules enabling the signs to have meaning. But that system was apparently self-contained, so dissolving the older subject-object dualism, which language had seemed capable of bridging, merely ushered in a new, unbridgeable dualism of language and reality. The "modern" response, as mirroring and representation were called into question, encompassed the diverse efforts, from Bergson to structuralism, to specify an alternative conception, as well as the ironic sense of disjunction between language and reality that seemed the outcome for those who found us trapped in language as a self-contained system.

Another possibility was to consider the connection between language, as finite yet unstable and changing, and the coming to be of a particular world. It is striking that even Bergson did not develop this possibility, though his thinking combined the generally pragmatist insight with an emphasis on the reality of creativity, change, and novelty. He was so concerned with the sense in which language cuts us off from something that he did not focus on the way changing, growing language is bound up with the coming to be of a particular world.

By looking in precisely this other direction, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger brought human being together with the actual historical world in a way that eluded the dualism of language and reality that lurked in the array of modern approaches. From their perspective, it was not enough to make the generally pragmatist point that human knowing is bound up with living and doing. The deeper challenge was to explore the sense in which human being, knowing, and language are bound up with the motion of the world, with the ongoing happening of a particular totality. And thus the distinctive effort to link human being to history, coming to be, happening, or event that characterized the effort of each to sidestep the subject-object dualism.

But once we have separated human being and world in the first place, it is hard to characterize, in a nondualistic way, the relationship between ourselves and the endless coming to be of our particular world. Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger each took pains to do so without falling into either side of the long-standing metaphysical dualism. We human beings are not active agents, in the strong metaphysical or modern sense, but neither are we passive instruments or contemplators. In the final analysis, there is simply no point in asking how some distinguishable, preexisting subjective consciousness arrives at knowledge of the so-called external world.^[32] Nor was any of the three thinkers settling simply for another form of subjectivist idealism, conceiving language as a

[32] For this point in Heidegger, see Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics , 118–119; and Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 226. On p. 122, Zimmerman notes that Heidegger, for all his assault on modern subjectivism, vacillated between "to shape or fashion a thing" and "to draw out or to disclose what is somehow already there."

projection of the world by subjectivity, though an initial reading might suggest as much. Rather, each sought to fuse human being and world so that the questions yielding the whole array of such metaphysical responses do not arise.^[33] Heidegger's several characterizations of human being—as Dasein , or being-in-the-world, as dwelling in the house of language, as the clearing or opening for some world to come to be—were attempts to convey, sometimes rigorously, sometimes poetically, a nondualistic relationship that had already been central, though less explicit, for Nietzsche and Croce.

Indeed, although some of their accents were discordant, all three thinkers found language fundamental as the intersection between human being and the endless becoming of the particular world in time, through history.^[34] Even for Nietzsche, whose assault on metaphysical truth led him to speak of lies and fictions, language does not hide what is "really" nothingness, chaos, flux, any more than it represents or copies—or cannot quite represent or copy—an independent objective world. Language is the medium through which some particular world comes to be.

Because our language is bound up with coming to be, we cannot hope to define it once and for all or confine it within stable linguistic rules. Croce's radically historicist conception anticipated Wittgenstein's brand of ordinary language philosophy in obliterating any distinction between language and speech.^[35] As a system, "language" is nothing but a momentary, provisional abstraction from what speech has done up until now. Language is thus the embodiment, at any one moment, of the particular totality of our collective experience so far. Heidegger's emphasis on the originary force of language, as the way of coming to be, and his notion of language as spoken by being itself as it particularizes in history are comparable to Croce's vision of spirit endlessly taking a certain form through creative language.

[33] See, for example, Nietzsche's way of playing down agency in On the Genealogy of Morals , trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (with Ecce Homo ), ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1967), 45–46; the subject is not conceivable apart from the doing itself. See also his assault on subjectivism in The Will to Power , ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1967), 267–271 (nos. 481–490), and 297–299 (no. 552).

[34] Nietzsche sometimes suggested that the world is forever outgrowing what we can say about it. Language grows as it seeks to catch up, but it always remains one step behind. See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols , in The Portable Nietzsche , ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 530–531. For Heidegger, in contrast, language is always ahead of us. Even for Heidegger, however, our actual speech lags behind language, so Heidegger's conception proves closer to Nietzsche's than it initially seems. See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial, 1971), 75.

[35] Hayden White has made this point to good effect in his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 390–391. Wittgenstein has been more often compared with Heidegger; see Ross Mandel, "Heidegger and Wittgenstein: A Second Kantian Revolution," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays , ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 259–270, for a helpful approach to the points at issue.

Following Heidegger's lead, Gadamer would make the overall point more explicitly still: It is precisely in coming to expression in language that being is temporalized (sich zeitigt ).^[36] The illusion that things precede their manifestation in language conceals the fundamentally linguistic character of our experience of the world. So rather than assuming a dualism, forcing priority to either world or mind, we start with the correspondence or congruence itself, which becomes concrete in our linguistic experience of the world. As we grasp what it means to be always within language, we no longer worry about something outside, transcendent, from which we might feel excluded. The problems of epistemology dissolve, the irony of separation dissipates, and we shift our focus to the horizontal dimension—the history—that is generated as language expands. It is a matter of indifference whether we say instead "that we generate as we expand the language." To understand things in a nondualistic way is to cease worrying about such distinctions.

In conceiving reality as an overarching eventing or happening, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger each explicitly eschewed any strong conception of human agency.^[37] Although the world becomes some particular way only as the result of what we do, history is no more the result of conscious human choice than it is of divine providence. We cannot foresee what will result from our actions, so we do not know, as we participate in the happening of it, what is being made of this moment, the resultant so far. Nor does history become the product of willed human agency at some point, as in one understanding of Marxism. To avoid any implication that we, as conscious subjects, make the world, or that we are the instruments of some supraindividual entity that makes the world, we sometimes seem forced to adopt contorted phrasing, especially involving passive voice, to speak of what is happening as a world results through human being and language.

But just as history is not willed human creation, neither is it some blurry, incomprehensible backdrop for personal existence. All three thinkers confronted, more systematically than the early modernists, the relationship between individual human being and the larger public or historical world. At issue for each was not simply the historicity of my personal life but my involvement with the whole endlessly provisional world that comes to be through history. And Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger each started, at least, by positing a relationship of congruence between human being and that world. Human being is not to be understood as merely finite, in contrast with infinite

[36] Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics , 50. See also pp. 77–79.

[37] Although Croce's hostility to the culture of science led him to claim links to the humanistic tradition, he, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, eschewed Cartesian subjectivism and Hegelian notions of human self-revelation. Indeed, Croce was repeatedly attacked for playing down individual agency and the subjectivity of the person in insisting that the spirit—ultimately history itself—is the only reality. See, for example, Benedetto Croce, Filosofia e storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1969; orig. pub. 1946), 144; which provoked existentialist assaults that will be discussed in chap. 5, below.

and always existing being; rather, human finitude is the other side of the world as historical.^[38] There is nothing inadequate about our relationship with a world of nothing but history, so there is no call for modernist irony.

For each of the three, however, new preoccupations intrude as we adjust to such a world. In seeking to think through individual experience, each fastened on a family of "religious" categories—responsibility, anxiety, guilt, judgment, grace, redemption, innocence, the holy. At this point, however, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger diverged, for an array of new possibilities seemed to open. We may feel a heightened sense of responsibility, or a sense of relief and innocence, or the need for a kind of disengagement. But for all three, the sense that personal possibilities are radically bound up with a particular place in history was fundamental.

The wave of generational thinking that Robert Wohl found characteristic of the "generation of 1914" stemmed not only from the ironies surrounding World War I but also from a growing sense that the horizons of personal experience are fundamentally historical. One result was a heightened feeling of responsibility—for seizing the opportunity that this particular moment allots me to contribute to the ongoing happening of the world. Yet the opportunity proves fragile, the moment fleeting, and most of Wohl's figures felt, by the 1920s, that they were living in disharmony with their own time.^[39] Although they experienced the interpenetration of historical situation and personal possibility in a heightened way, they were not sure how best to respond. It can be argued that those of this generation proved mostly futile because they failed to ask the historical questions necessary to understand the needs and possibilities of their particular historical moment.

In probing the relationship between individual experience and history, Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger focused precisely on the scope for historical inquiry and understanding, though in doing so each encountered the historiographical questions that remained open by the late nineteenth century. All three eschewed the emphasis on past as opposed to process that came to characterize historiography with Ranke's reaction against Hegel. For each, historical inquiry grows from an active present response and constitutes some particular way of connecting the past to the present. Our particular ways of knowing history, of connecting past and present, participate in the resulting of the next moment. Indeed, so radically is historical knowing bound up with the reality to be known that even the long-standing distinction between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum begins to blur. The reflexive sense that in affording some particular meaning to our history we are ourselves part of the ongoing process was crucial

[38] See Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics , 215, for this characterization with respect to Heidegger.

[39] Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 208, 235.

to each of the three thinkers, informing their sense of their own intellectual contributions.^[40]

However, to insist that historical knowing is bound up with present action seemed to surrender to precisely the relativism and skepticism that had come to seem so threatening by the later nineteenth century. And certainly it was axiomatic for each of the three thinkers that the old strong truth had fallen away. But whereas Nietzsche generally settled for a kind of perspectivism, Croce, Heidegger, and Gadamer, coming later, sought to show that it is still "truth" that happens—or can happen—as the particular world comes to be in language, including the language of historical understanding.^[41] And truth is possible precisely because the inquirer is also an actor, caught up in some particular present.

So the attempt to make sense of the postmetaphysical situation led Nietzsche, Croce, and Heidegger down the same path, which diverged from the innovative modernist course of their contemporaries. But though they conceived and even experienced the new situation in analogous ways, their responses came to differ radically.

[40] See Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985), on the centrality of reflexivity in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.

[41] Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), 218–220, 222; and David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1987), 137–163.