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Sublime experience and politics:Interview with Professor FrankAnkersmitMarcin MoskalewiczPublished online: 08 Apr 2007.

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Sublime Experience and Politics:Interview with Professor FrankAnkersmitMarcin Moskalewicz

The interview concerns, first, Frank Ankersmit’s last book on SublimeHistorical Experience and, second, his ideas on political philosophy and hisopinions on the current political situation of the European Union. In the first

part Ankersmit clarifies several ambiguities concerning his notion of historicalexperience. How does it relate to the transcendental epistemology? Where does

the sublimity of experience come from? What does its relationship with theempiricist model of experience look like? Why is it able to overcome the

traditional separation of subject and object? What is the difference betweensubjective and collective experience? The interviewee also explains the role of

historical experience in Western history and historiography. He discusses thepositive role it has played and still may play in historical writing, arguing for amore romanticized approach towards the past. Afterwards Ankersmit

elucidates his main ideas on political philosophy and the role and nature ofpolitical representation, expressing his critical attitude towards ‘scientific’

politics. He speaks about his engagement in Dutch politics, issues concerningthe recent privatization of the public sphere, the phenomenon of Quangos and

the significance of the state. He also comments on the failed EuropeanConstitution and the problems of political responsibility Europe is presently

facing. At the end Ankersmit expresses his views on the future of the EuropeanUnion, pondering several possible solutions to its current predicament.

Keywords: Transcendental Epistemology; Experience; Sublime; Political

Representation; Liberalism; European Union

Marcin Moskalewicz:1 Professor Ankersmit, your last book, which has

been published this year, is much different from your previous work

Rethinking HistoryVol. 11, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 251 – 274

ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13642520701270443

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dealing with problems of historical truth, historical representation and thelogic of historical narratives [Ankersmit 2005]. It is about experience, a

wholly different subject, at least at first sight. Could you please tell me howdid you come to this notion and to its importance?

Frank Ankersmit: It is not wholly unrelated to the kind of things that Ihave been doing before, since, as we discussed a moment ago in the car

when driving back from Groningen—my point of departure in philosophyof history has always been this issue, the relationship between language and

the world, and, in the case of historical theory, the relationship between thehistorical texts and historical reality. When I wrote my first book on

narrative logic [Ankersmit 1983] I was not yet aware of this now famousbook by Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but after I hadwritten my book I read the Rorty book and then I was struck by a number

of similarities in his approach, and what I had been trying to do in my bookon narrative logic.

So I became interested in Rorty and what especially fascinated me in hiswritings was his attack on epistemology. For it is the essence of Philosophy

and the Mirror of Nature that epistemology should be seen as a mostdoubtful enterprise, that we should stop doing it and should start asking

ourselves, as philosophers, other questions. Let’s change the discussion, asRorty likes to put it.

This is something that I have always been pondering, talking about

language and the world—without doing epistemology. Now, if you look atepistemology—you have many different systems of course, as they have

been developed since Descartes, Kant and down to the present—but what isalways crucial to all epistemological systems is that you have on the one

hand a subject, a knowing subject, and on the other an object, about whichthe subject has certain knowledge. And what I begun to understand

gradually and gropingly, in the course of the decennia, is that if one tries toget beyond epistemology, one should not take the route that has been

proposed by Rorty, which is to go back to Davidson. For if you do that, youwill in the end always return to philosophy of language as it has beenpracticed by analytical philosophers ever since the days of Frege. In sum,

what I intended to do is to pick up the thread again where Rorty hadinadvertently dropped it somewhere between his Mirror of Nature book and

his conversion to Davidson several years later. So something else,something more radical would have to be devised in order to achieve

this aim of getting beyond epistemology.Now, as I said a moment ago, what you have in all epistemologies is this

relationship between a knowing subject, on the one hand, and a part of theworld, on the other. And then I had the, in fact, rather obvious idea that

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what you have between the subject and the object—is, of course,experience. For if the subject does have knowledge of the world, succeeds

in obtaining knowledge of the object, then it’s experience enabling him tohave this. So, I began to understand that if I wanted to get away from

epistemology, and to do what Rorty had failed to do, I should focus on thisnotion of experience. But the problem is that there is a very obvious notion

of experience, the kind that you find in empiricism, and which perfectly fitswithin the traditional epistemological model. So turning to experience is

not sufficient; empiricism is, after all, also a form of epistemology. So whatI was looking for was a kind of experience which would somehow move us

out of this empiricist model, and where things would be possible that areimpossible in the epistemological and the empiricist model. Indeed, with‘friends’ like empiricism, the notion of experience needs no enemies

anymore.So I then came to see that I should have to take into account the sublime,

for the sublime is always a notion of experience—you always speak aboutsublime experience—but it is a kind of experience that breaks through the

epistemological framework. Indeed, the crucial insight is that when peoplein the seventeenth and eighteenth century were talking about the sublime,

people like Burke in his Inquiry into Sublime and Beautiful and Kant is hisKritik der Urteilskraft, then you always see that something happens in theirphilosophy, which is at odds with their epistemology. For example, when

Burke discusses the sublime and he has this Lockean psychology uponwhich all experience is to be modeled, where on the one extreme you have

pain and on the other you have pleasure, but the sublime has both thesethings together. So what is forbidden by this Lockean epistemology takes

place in the Burkeian sublime. And something similar is true for theKantian sublime, though things are far more complicated in Kant. This is

why I understood that if you want to get rid of epistemology you shouldfocus on sublime experience.

And then, from there, it’s relatively simple and merely a matter of havingle courage de ses opinions. For then you will see that this notion ofexperience must also, somehow, transcend the powers and imperialism of

subject and object. So that you only have the experience and that subjectand the object, well, are, so to speak, phenomena of a later stage. And also

that you will have to move beyond truth, since truth is the epistemologicalnotion par excellence. So this is why the most important step in the

experience book is the one where I dissociate experience from truth.So that’s how I came to this notion of experience, and later to that of

historical experience. But mainly, it was this essentially philosophicalproblem of getting beyond epistemology that made me interested in the

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notion of experience. In the same time I also started thinking aboutexperience as Aristotle described it in his De Anima. For there you also have

the notion of experience, but Aristotelian experience does not fit within theepistemological model. This has to do with the fact that, in the case of

Aristotle, you have continuity between the subject and the object that iscompletely unthinkable in epistemology, where you always have this

epistemological gap between the subject and the object. So I beganinvestigating the Aristotelian model of experience and then gradually

moved on to the sublime notion of experience.MM: Abandoning epistemology is explicitly announced in the book as your

main goal. You write that you want to get rid of ‘transcendentalmonstrosities’. And then you deal with many different traditions thatyou include in this notion of transcendental monstrosities, such divergent

traditions as structuralism, semiotics, tropology, Gadamerian hermeneuticsand even deconstruction. How do you feel going so fiercely against all these

intellectual achievements of twentieth-century philosophy?FA: The answer is fairly simple. From my perspective they have this all in

common: that they are still feeding on the legacy of transcendentalism.A large part of the book that deals with Gadamer tries to show that

Gadamer, probably the philosopher in all of Western philosophy who was,together with Rorty, a more consistent opponent of epistemology than anyother, in the end also adopts the epistemological model with his notion of

Wirkungsgeschichte. So they all—Gadamer and Rorty as well—feed on thislegacy of epistemology. And how do you find out about this? What’s the

litmus-test here, so to speak?Well, the answer is as simple as anything, for if a philosophy leaves no

room for experience, or reduces it to the impotent empiricist conception ofexperience, then you are still within the epistemological framework. And

that’s even true if you think you are miles away from what bothersphilosophers like Frege, Quine, Dummett or Davidson. Think, for example,

of Derrida in his Margins of Philosophy, where he says that there’s thisnotion of experience and that it should be ‘erased’, placed sous rature, as hecalls it, and in all these other systems like structuralism, poststructuralism

and in Hayden White’s tropology the notion of experience makes no senseat all. So if you want to go on with experience, then you know that all these

systems, not having any substantial account of experience, or even outrighthostile to it, will have to be abandoned and overcome somehow.

MM: Your book has also a very clearly addressed audience, which isapparently not philosophers, but historians. It is to them that you address

your plea for a more romanticized historical writing and for abandonmentof the artificial imposition of scientific theories onto the historical matter.

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If currently the main problem of historical writing is—as you claim—itsincreasing incommensurability and fragmentation, in which way does the

notion of experience serve as a remedy for this state of affairs?FA: Well, let’s begin once again with epistemology. It’s fairly obvious that

one can relate epistemology to the Enlightenment, since epistemologyalways wants to show how truth comes into being, how truth can be

justified etc. and these are the kind of preoccupations we have learned toassociate with the Enlightenment. But after the Enlightenment came

Romanticism and with Romanticism you move into the world of things likefeelings and sentiments etc., and for which the Enlightenment paradigm

had no use. So when I wanted to get away from epistemology, this was alsoa move towards Romanticism. In fact, the experience book is in manyrespects a repetition of the transition from the Enlightenment to

Romanticism—but often performed with the instruments of the Enlight-enment, as I should hasten to add, for I have no patience with irrationality

and poor argument. Anyway, this was the shift that made me interested inhow we feel about the past, and also in the kind of moods and feelings that

you might identify or find in the past itself, and that I consider to belegitimate topics of historical research. ‘Sentir, c’est penser’, to quote

Rousseau.In sum, in the epistemological model you have on the one hand the

object, the past, and on the other you have a historian; these are always

carefully kept apart from the other within the epistemologist’s ideology—but you should not focus on these separate worlds, but on what might unite

them or what lies between the two of them, so to speak. So what happens toyou when you have such an encounter with the past, what feelings do you

find or could you project on the past, and what feelings do you have whenbecoming aware of the moods and feeling permeating some part of the past.

So it has, both, well, let’s say the methodological dimension, as well as thedimension as far as the subject matter to be investigated by the historian is

concerned. I just read Gumbrecht’s book on presence [Gumbrecht 2004];and there you see much the same things, though Gumbrecht is, I believe,insufficiently aware of all the philosophical complications involved in all

this.MM: Assuming that historians after reading your book would make a move

toward experience and would eagerly try to experience the past, do youreally believe that it would have the outcome of unification of historical

writings? We can realistically presume that each historian would experiencethe same part of the past differently and that would give even more

incommensurability than in the case of applying scientific theories to thepast.

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FA: Well, let me say this. The book is not intended to announce arevolution in historical writing. I had a teacher here, Professor Kossmann,2

who used to say that ‘History is like an elephant’. And he wanted to expresswith this that an elephant is a big animal and you can try to push it, but it

will not move an inch in spite of all your efforts. And so it is with historicalwriting. That has its own tradition, its own logic, and its own way of

developing. And when you have a historical theorist saying, well, youshould do this, you should do that, nobody will care about what the

historical theorist is saying. So I have no pretension to change the historicaldiscipline. If I have any revolutionary pretensions (in spite of my rather

conservative turn of mind), then these are for philosophy only. Indeed,there I would like to rearrange things a little.

With regard to history, and the historians, there is only this rather

modest remark in the beginning of the book where I say that if somehistorian would have this more intimate contact with the past, he should

not react by saying ‘now I’m on the wrong path, this is something not to betaken seriously’, but that he should welcome and embrace it, that he should

try to work with it, and that he should consider it to be an extra instrumentthat might give him access to the past. When I am describing the two types

of historical experience I distinguish between one that you can attribute toindividual historians, and next sublime historical experience, which is moreof a collective affair. But with regard to the former I would say that

historians may sometimes have this strange relationship with the past—andthat they then should trust their experience and feelings, that they should

become aware that this is an extra, that this is a bonus not given tohistorians who don’t have it, that they shouldn’t do away with it, but make

use of it in their writings.MM: There is also a third type of experience, which is very rarely mentioned

in the book, the kind of objective experience that is the way that the peoplein the past experienced their present. You seemed to abandon the hopes that

you expressed many times in the early nineties connected to the micro-histories, which are a mean of conveying this experience. Why is that so?FA: Well, it’s in a sense a different problem. This is the experience vecue in

the past, in history itself. And this is a topic that, well, has been addressedby a lot of writers already and you could say that even some sixteenth-

century historians like La Popeliniere and Etienne Pasquier already did thiskind of work and investigated the experience of the past, the experience

vecue, of people in the Middle Ages. So this is not a new problem and, well,I’d rather focus on new problems—and these are to be found in the two

other kinds of experience. But I completely respect this as a topic ofhistorical research that one should do. There’s no problem about that.

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MM: In Martin Jay’s recent book [Jay 2005] on the notion of experience inthe Western modern discourse your conception of historical experience

serves as a transition from the discussion of the more differentiated notionsof experience to those more totalizing. Jay argues that you have wholly

abandoned epistemology for a purely aesthetic alternative that ultimatelyresults in the dissolution of the subject. Do you find this reproach

justifiable or do you consider this as a reproach?FA: Yes, I think this is a correct description, for this dissolution of the

subject, well, that’s part of what you get when you get beyondepistemology. Then there’s only the experience. That’s what I tried to

show in the chapter on Gadamer; namely, that this notion of experiencethat you get when you cut through the ties between experience and truthis always a kind of experience which is non-epistemological and therefore

indifferent to the separation between the subject and object. In this wayone might, perhaps, say that it is totalizing. But this is not how I would

describe it, for this term ‘totalizing’ is part of the epistemologists’vocabulary. ‘Totalization’ is what you get when the subject is completely

subsumed by the object—or vice versa—and such a situation could, ofcourse, never occur when you abandon, as I want to have it, both

subject and object in favor of experience. I had a lengthy correspondenceabout this with Martin Jay, but I never succeeded in making this clearto him.

In fact, I would rather say that the focus on experience would be thevery opposite of ‘totalization’, since it’s a movement of withdrawal within

experience. Everything is taken together in the experience and, so, there’sa movement from the totality of the world into the experience and that

would be the opposite of what is suggested by this notion of totalization,I suppose. But with regard to aesthetics, I think that’s a perfectly correct

association for historical experience is explicitly related to aestheticexperience. So that’s also correct, yes. Anyway, when I talk about

aesthetics, it is not primarily the arts I am thinking of, but rather ofwhat philosophical sub-discipline should take the place of epistemology—for example, if we have to do with a discipline such as historical writing.

MM: The sublime experience is meant as a means of liberation fromlanguage, from the violence that language does over the world, which is the

opposite of totalizing. But on the other hand this is the experience that isconstitutive for a certain civilization or culture. It does not seem to depend

on our will, but it’s rather a super-individual force that comes fromnowhere and that shapes us following its own unattainable logic. And

therefore, if we are in this kind of experience, forced by it to forget the past,shouldn’t we speak not only about the liberating side of the sublime

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experience, about the liberation from language, but also about the kind ofviolence that sublime implies with itself?

FA: Violence I would associate rather with epistemology, since epistemol-ogy does violence to the world by forcing it to fit within its own framework,

with unpleasant consequences for disciplines such as historical writing,since this discipline stubbornly resists subsumption within the epistemol-

ogist’s framework, as we know by now. So this tends to turn theepistemologist into a person with a penchant for ‘violence’, as we know so

well from the history of historical theory. Anyway, it’s wholly different withthe sublime and the kind of experience I model on the sublime, for in the

sublime you are overwhelmed by reality, so if any violence is being done,it’s violence being done to . . . well, I wouldn’t argue to use the term ‘thesubject’, for I’ve just been saying that the kind of experience that I have in

mind is an experience without a subject of experience—but this isnevertheless what it comes closest to.

And, because of this, it is certainly not accompanied by a feeling ofliberation. I mean, we feel free in language; language is what we like. We do

not feel happy with the sublime. I have this chapter on the prison-house oflanguage, and it’s true that in the world of epistemology we live in this

prison-house of language. But we should be aware that we like to live in thisprison-house of language. It’s so very comfortable there. That’s why we havelanguage: it makes the world accessible, and it enables us to domesticate the

world, to be its undisputed master. Because we can then exert its violence onreality and give to reality the form that suits us best. So, it’s comfortable to

be in the prison-house of language. Whereas it’s very cold anduncomfortable in the indifferent and outside world of the sublime. For

then you are in the hands of reality, and without help and means to defendyourself against it. That’s why the sublime is directly related to trauma, and

why it is terrible. If you stand face to face with reality that’s only terrible andthe sublime does not have any pleasurable element in it.

MM: Could you explain more precisely the difference between thesubjective historical experience and the sublime historical experience?And then, especially, do you really believe that in the subjective experience

we can see the past as it really was, the past itself, or—following your ownmetaphor that it is love without a climax—isn’t it just an experience of the

past breaking away from the present? And therefore in this experience werecognize only the difference and the loss, and after all there is no touch, we

come very close to this touch of the past, but we can only feel the loss. So,how do you relate the two?

FA: I think the basic form is the sublime kind of experience, so thecollective type of experience. For then you have this breaking away of the

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past from the present. Or, let me put it a bit more clearly, you begin withhaving a kind of indiscriminate present, or, rather, a situation in which the

present is not yet experienced as ‘the present’, a situation of a certainhistorical naivete, so to speak. Then some overwhelming social or political

upheaval takes place, something in the order of the French Revolution, orwhat happened in Italy after 1494, and that was so singularly traumatic to

Guicciardini and Machiavelli. And that may tear this still indiscriminatepresent apart into a past and a present. The past comes into being only

then—and the present as well, as we should not lose from sight. There is nopast without a present, as this account makes clear—and as Hegel has so

brilliantly shown. Past and present are the two sides of one and the samecoin, of this indiscriminate present, so to speak.

That’s the basic form of historical experience and which is, therefore,

basically, an experience of loss since you lose that part of this indiscriminatepresent that has now become your past. That may be a large part of a

civilization’s identity; so that’s why a civilization dies a partial death undersuch circumstances. But this always has to do with history on the grand

scale, with things such as the French or the Industrial Revolution, the Deathof God etc.

But the same may also happen on a much smaller scale and in thedomain of the less conspicuous and less important aspects of human life.Now, precisely because these are the less conspicuous parts of human

existence, nobody may really perceive that the past is breaking, or hasalready broken away from this indiscriminate present.

I mean, if a French Revolution is going on, nobody can fail to notice this.But when something similar happens in the domain of daily life and our

experience of it, we may simply not be aware of it. But, then, all of asudden, we may then see some representation of what some aspect of daily

life used to be like in the past, and then, we may suddenly realize ourselvesfor the first time how very much different the present is, in fact, from the

past. This is the Huizinga type of historical experience.You can say two things about it. One, that it will always announce itself

on those domains of human existence that we somehow naively think to be

resistant to historical change. And, second, we may then suddenly realizeourselves that even this aspect of human existence has changed out of

recognition. This gives you the historical experience in question. You mightwell compare it to a piece of elastic that is stretched ever and ever more,

until suddenly it breaks, because it has been stretched too far. It’s fairlycomplicated, but this is, more or less, how it is with the Huizinga type of

historical experience. You might say that it’s a kind of ‘deferred historicalexperience’.

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MM: How often does this break that you are talking about happen? I mean,do you claim that we can become aware of the past as such only thanks to

the sublime experience, of the past as something different from the present?Is this experience the only thing responsible for the desire of being that is

constantly being substituted by the knowledge of the past, as you claim?FA: I find it hard to answer. I think that’s scattered all over society and that

one should take care not to restrict the notion of historical experience towhat goes on in historical writing and to historians. I think that many

people may have a historical experience, when they become aware that theirworld has changed. For example in your world in Poland or in Russia, that

you suddenly become aware that the world has become completely differentsince 1989 or what happened in 1917 or in the United States during theCivil War. And it may even be that ordinary people are more susceptible to

historical experience then historians, since historians, well, are alwayssubject to this professionalization of their discipline, and always tend to

distrust historical experience.So, how frequent it is, I think that’s a very difficult question to answer—

nevertheless, I would like to add the following speculation. Suppose youhave a civilization in which you have no huge social and political upheavals,

like the French Revolution, but only these small-scale developments onemust associate with the Huizinga type of historical experience. But wherethe number of these small-scale historical changes is huge; so large, in fact,

that their total sum may amount to little less than a permanent FrenchRevolution, to a French Revolution that is going on and on, so to say. Well,

I think this is what our contemporary world is like. And if that is true,historical experience surely is a figure of the future. I mean, nobody can fail

to see a French Revolution—and then the historian may start to write aboutit. But if you only have these small-scale developments, you will really need

historical experience in order to become aware of historical change at all.MM: Would you therefore be willing to give a more liberal, so to say, status

to this notion of experience and to allow telling more than one story aboutit? It seems from your account that it is rather a rare phenomenon. Whatdo you think for example of giving the status of the sublime dissociation

and radical rupture with the past to that which Poland experienced in thewake of the nineties?

FA: I think that you made a very important point at the beginning of yourquestion, when asking if there are many variants of historical experience?

And I should wish to emphasize that this certainly is the case. I mean, if youwish to avoid epistemology, then you should avoid any kind of legislation

for how we relate to the world. So it would be a very poor way of gettingbeyond epistemology, if you would come up with another kind of

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legislation of what historical experience should be like. So, what I tried todo in the experience book is to say, well, there are a certain kinds of

historical experience—and I gave a number of examples of Herder, Goetheetc., then Huizinga’s historical experience, and I also mentioned two

experiences that have been important to myself—and you can also think ofthe large-scale kind of historical experience having to do with the French

Revolution. But this is not delimitative, and not meant to be so. There maybe many more kinds of historical experience and I hope that one of the

reactions to the book will be that people will say that Ankersmit has beenfar too restrictive, and that there are many more kinds of historical

experience than I described. And then I would say, well, this is interestingso let’s explore this and see what can be done with these other kinds ofhistorical experience. So, it’s the last thing that I would try to do with the

book is to give some kind of legislation for historical experience.MM: It’s very hard to get rid of epistemology. Even your book is, after all,

an epistemological enterprise, since we want to know something aboutexperience. This is paradoxical and we may say that the book is one big

paradox, since it attempts to convey in language some truths aboutsomething that—by your own definition—is beyond language. My

question is: was it your intention to use the figure of paradox so often toshow that it is ultimately impossible to give a coherent and non-paradoxicalimage of experience by the linguistic means?

FA: No, it’s part of the whole program, part of the whole idea. There is, forexample, the chapter on Burckhardt that deals with what kind of sublime

historical experience one may associate with him. And then one of thefascinating things is that Burckhardt does not reject professional historical

writing, even though he is very much opposed to it. That’s the paradox, soto speak, in his writing. And you have the same with Huizinga: they did not

reject professional historical writing, but only wanted make us aware ofwhat you might lose with it.

But this writing in the margins of professional historical writing (to putit in a Derridean manner) suggested by Burckhardt and Huizinga isabsolutely of the greatest importance in the context of my argument. The

argument is, roughly, that you need professionalized historical writing inorder to become aware of what you inevitably lose with it. But it is precisely

this awareness that may reveal the past to you in historical experience. Sohistorical experience parasitizes on professional historical writing—and in

this way depends on it. So the paradox is that you need professionalhistorical writing in order to be open to the revelations of historical

experience. This, then, is why you will find paradoxes throughout the book.Historical experience is born from paradox.

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MM: One of the most important figures in your book is Walter Benjamin.His notion of aura is the main means to convey the meaning of the

dissociation, the fact that we can recognize something only after we had lostit. But there is also the main difference that in Benjamin the redemption

was possible and the past could enter the present, while in yourargument . . .

FA: . . . it’s the other way around, yes . . .MM: . . . it’s the other way around. It is the movement of disunion and not

toward the union. Does the sublime experience give us any promise ofredemption?

FA: No, no I wouldn’t say. This is what I’ve been saying in the last chapterabout the notion of myth. And that what I describe as the cold heart of thecivilization, all that you, that part that you attempt to historicize, but you

are unsuccessful in historicizing. And that’s the world that we have lost, it’salways painful. And you won’t get back to this idyllic past that you try to

historicize, but the more you do it, the less you can get access to it. I justdiscovered a wonderful passage in Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragedie when

he says this, I could show it to you.3 But therefore, well, there is inBenjamin the dimension of a messianic optimism, so to speak, he has this

hope of redemption, whereas I have the reverse model and for me it canonly get worse. The more you try getting hold of this mythical past, themore you will lose it for that very reason. It’s much like what Rousseau said

about how history has started. We began with living in the state of natureand we want to get back, but the more we try to get back to it by creating

civilization, with notions like truth and virtue etc., the further we will beremoved from it. It’s this metaphor of this ten-lane highway and that only

moves in one direction and that gets you away, well, from the ideal or myththat you are always striving for. Whereas Rousseau argues that you only

have these crooked little back roads that might get you back to it—hence,the kind of uncertain and twisted accounts such as we find in his

Confessions and where he tried to retrace the route to his self, while beingwell aware of the utter impossibility of the task. This is also how it is in theexperience book and why it is a very somber and pessimistic book.

MM: There is clearly a certain movement that the sublime implies. I meanthe fact that we can abandon the past and acquire a wholly new identity.

But would you say that sublime implies also a progress?FA: A progress in a sense that the tension, the sublime tension between

these two directions, historicization and the myth, tends to grow everlarger. So that the more we move away from this mythic past, the more we

will try to get more closer to it; so it’s a kind of alienation effected by theeffort to overcome alienation. And, in the end, our alienation from this

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mythic past will only increase. So there is progress, in a certain sense, butit’s a progress in the increase of tension.

MM: Progress that is at the same time a regression?FA: Yes, it moves in the opposite directions. And that’s what you have with

paradox and with the sublime that you always have these oppositedirections and it always grows even worse and worse.

MM: Let me make a slight move now from sublime to politics, which isyour second main area of interests. In your work on political philosophy

you observed a truly captivating historical relationship between the existingparadigms of historical writing and the concurrent paradigms of the

political exercise of power. Could you please tell me more about thisrelationship? I mean the relationship between historicism and parliamen-tary democracy, and narrativism as up-to-date version of historicism and

the aesthetic politics that you pronounce as a proper model for the twenty-first century.

FA: Yes, well, actually I think I should go back to the time when I studiedhistory here. I had a teacher here in Groningen, I mentioned his name

already, Professor Kossmann, ‘the man of the elephant’, so to speak, and hetaught here political philosophy, political theory. I admired him a great

deal, we could get on very well with each other, though intellectually ratherthan personally, I should add. He had an unusually strong and fascinatingpersonality—I never met anyone even remotely coming close to what he

was like. Just to give you an idea: he was all that one might associate withFrancois Guizot, very much aloof, very intelligent, both impossible to get

close to and yet very much accessible and blessed with the rhetorical powersof a Pericles. If he had decided for a political career, the recent history of my

country would have completely different from what it is now. It rarelyhappened, but if he really felt that this was necessary he could raise a

rhetorical storm blowing away everything and everybody. Indeed, whenthinking of him, I never am sure what impressed me most, his scholarship

or his personality. He was a truly wonderful man. Anyway, he very muchwanted me to continue his interests and to start doing political theory aswell. So he was deeply disappointed by my choice for philosophy of history.

I did consider giving in to his wishes, but in the end I opted for historicaltheory. Well, I regret this decision right now, for philosophy of history has

not given me what I had hoped from it. But as Gibbon said, ‘But, alas,where error is irreparable, repentance is useless’.

Anyway, I have always kept this fascination for political philosophy that Ihad inherited from Kossmann. So when I am doing historical theory, I

always have at the back of my mind the question, what might this mean forpolitics? And for a long time I couldn’t relate the two of them in any clear

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and meaningful way. But then I moved in historical theory from narrativeto representation. Since then it was fairly obvious, for, on the one hand the

historian offers a representation of the past, but you also have thephenomenon of political representation. So, this notion of representation

was the link between my preoccupations as historical theorist, asphilosopher of history on the one hand, and what I’ve been saying since

then on political philosophy, on the other. Since then, I’ve always been,well, kind of shuttling back and forth between political theory and

historical theory. So each time I want to make a certain move in historicaltheory, I ask myself what implications could or should this have for

political philosophy and vice versa.MM: So putting this analogy forward, let’s think about the sublime now. Ifthe sublime as a collective experience is taken seriously, it is a kind of

experience that serves as a recurrent historical foundation of our collectiveidentity. And we can—thanks to this experience—recognize ourselves as

being in a certain moment of history. Having in mind this whole idea ofdissociation, a kind of suicide that civilizations may undertake—what kind

of politics would follow from this?FA: Yes, that’s a very important question you are addressing there and I

think that the first sub-question, so to speak, that you would have to dealwith is to what extent this kind of sublime historical experience can orought to be translated into the sphere of politics. For sublime historical

experience is a total involvement in a new way, a new kind of cultural andhistorical experience. And if you would try to translate it to politics, then it

would be only possible on the presupposition that politics should have todeal with this. But I’m not sure about this. I mean, politics is only an aspect

of our lives. And I would, well, with the memory of totalitarianism at theback of our heads, be very wary of having the world of culture and history

being invaded by politics. Nevertheless, it’s an important problem. And infact I shall be giving a talk in Finland in January next year on political

representation and experience, and I will then try to move this notion ofexperience from the sphere of history to that of politics. But I still have tofind out about how to do this. So I am afraid I haven’t answered it yet, but

maybe when you will be back here next year, I can tell you more about this.Speaking more generally, this is how I proceeded in my intellectual

career. I mean, there has been very little outside influence on myintellectual development—apart, then, from that of Rorty. I am always

dealing with questions that have been occasioned by previous phases in mydevelopment and I use the work of others only insofar as it may be of help

to me in this process. But I never have much interest for their work as such;when reading my colleagues, I always ask myself: what can I do with it.

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So I’m a kind of intellectual plunderer, so to say. That’s also why I ammuch of a solitary. Not coincidentally did I make Descartes’s motto into

my own: ‘bene vixit bene qui latuit’. That’s also why I have never feltcompelled to advertise my ideas; I live in my own world and that suits me

well enough.MM: We can also think about the subjective kind of experience and its

possible application to politics. You very often emphasize in your politicaltexts the importance of the recognition of the gap between the

representatives and the electorate, which is constitutive of aesthetic politics.It was also a central claim of your main book on political philosophy from

ten years ago [Ankersmit 1996], where the importance of the gap lies in thefact that it enables our self-recognition . . .FA: . . . and I think it was also a source of legitimate political power. That

legitimate political power is born in this gap between the representatives onthe one hand and the electorate on the other. And with the implication that

you cannot attribute the source of political power to either of them. That’swhy I would be against the notion of popular sovereignty.

MM: So how does sublime relate to this? I mean the subjective historicalexperience. Isn’t your last book a kind of promise of the contact between

the represented and the representatives that is not mediated, analogically, tohistorical experience? And do you believe in any attempts to overcome thisrepresentational gap in politics?

FA: Well, as I said a moment ago, this is simply what I still have to thinkabout, but I would say my first intuition would be that it might be very

dangerous to do this kind of thing. I think that the notion of the sublimerequires you to do away with the notion of subject and object. But

transposing all this to politics is like playing with fire. It would certainlypull you away from the domain of daily politics, from politics as a going

concern. And since I am in politics what you might characterize as aconservative liberal—and rather a Tocqueville than a Mill—I am much

afraid of this kind of move. Freedom is for me the alpha and omega of allpolitics. On the other hand, when trying to explain the historical sublime,Tocqueville’s reaction to the French Revolution always is what I first have

in mind. So, perhaps there is a connection after all.MM: When you claim that representation is as insurmountable and

intrinsic in historical writing as it is in politics, you are making use of thenarrative philosophy, of the philosophy of the text as a whole. But what

would you think of making use of the analogy with the contemporaryanalytical philosophy of common language in politics? I mean, in the

philosophy of common language that deals with single sentencestranslatability is—even if not wholly possible—it is much more possible

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than when we think about historical representation. So would you see thisanalogy useful or fruitful to explore in a sense that it would enable us to

achieve in politics what we cannot achieve in history?FA: So you are speaking about ordinary language and you’re thinking of

people like Austin and Gilbert Ryle?MM: And issues like Davidsonian radical interpretation. When we deal

with single sentences—as in daily life—we can to a large extent understandeach other. And things like the charity principle really work in daily life.

And politics is about daily life. So what would you think about this?FA: That’s a question I can fairly easily answer. I think that’s how politics is

quite often made nowadays, in a sense that one takes science as the modelfor politics. Just look at contemporary politics and perennial reduction ofpolitics to economic theory and to econometry. That’s doing politics as

suggested by this model of Anglo-Saxon philosophy of history, whichfocuses on the statement and the scientific theory. So that’s what we have

already, but I think that’s dangerous, for it’s then you lose the grasp of thewhole.

One of the more curious paradoxes of our contemporary world is thatthe individual citizen has a better and more secure grasp of the whole than

the state and official politics. And having such a grasp of the whole is anindispensable condition of all meaningful politics. One cannot makeresponsible political decisions as long as one does not have some intuition,

however tentative, about how all the segments of society hang together andwhat the consequences for one segment might be if you change something

in another. But ‘scientific politics’, the kind of politics we presently have,tends to blind you to this kind of question.

MM: And what about the possibility of overcoming the gap between therepresentatives and the electorate?

FA: Well, ‘scientific politics’ attempts to overcome the gap by ignoring thegap. But I think we live in a ‘broken universe’—aesthetically ‘broken’ in the

sense that there is an aesthetic gap between the representative and whomhe represents. The basic fact in politics is not what things are like, and whatthe economist, the social or political scientist might say about how things

are—not truth is what counts, but how we relate to each other in terms ofhow we represent each other. Politics has not to do with how we can

describe each other in terms of individual true statements in the way thescientist might do this. At the level of, well, human, ordinary human

interaction this level of representation is present already. And it gets anextra impulse and demonstrates itself in a far more dramatic way when you

reach the level of, well, how the electorate relates to its representatives. Allthese things were perfectly clear already to the Machiavelli of the Discorsi.

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But now we tend to forget about this. There presently is a strong tendencyto try to box, so to speak, politics within the scientific model. For that

seems to suggest that all our political problems would permit, would allowour scientific answer in the end. In this way much of contemporary politics

is an attempt to do away with politics. That’s one of the funny things aboutpolitics: that it tries to make itself superfluous and therefore creates new

problems and then it has to subsist for another period.But one of the most forceful attempts to make politics superfluous has

been this attempt to, well, to use scientific models. You have this essay byCarl Schmitt, Politik im Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen and where he shows

that you have all through the centuries, since the sixteenth century, thisattempt to neutralize politics. And in our own time one hopes to achievethis by economics and the sciences. And think for example of Daniel Bell

with his The End of Ideology. So this is where I would completely agree withyour hero, Hannah Arendt, when she criticizes the politics of our time for

its exclusive interest in the domain of the oikia, that is, in economics.Politics and politicians will have to learn again to recognize the face of the

other. This is what only representation can teach us—and this is the onlysafeguard of political and civil liberty.

MM: Let me now make a slight move to a more practical level and ask youhow your political theory goes together with your practical politicalpreoccupations? You are a co-author of a recent ‘Liberal Manifesto’ of the

Dutch Party VVD,4 of which you are an active member. My question is,how do you define liberalism in regard to your previous answer? Liberal

individualism seems at odds with your praise of the state and of this clear-cut distinction between the state on the one hand and the civil society and

economy on the other.FA: To begin with, why did I become a member of this committee writing

the liberal manifesto? Well, there is a statement by Tocqueville somewherein De la democratie en Amerique that I like a lot and that goes like this: ‘in

politics nothing is as unproductive as an abstract idea’. And I think he’scompletely right with this. That’s also why I hate people like Rawls,Dworkin, Ackerman and Brian Barry and their likes so very much. For this

has nothing to do with actual problems. I think that political philosophy,which does not have any concrete application to a real problem, is wholly

useless, that’s a mere academic plaything and we should stop doing this assoon as possible.

If you look at the history of political philosophy, then you will find thatall the great political philosophers, people like Machiavelli, Jean Bodin,

Hobbes, Locke or a Tocqueville, were always people who were dealing withsome contemporary social or political problem that they believed to be

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very, very urgent. And then they said, well, if we fail to solve this problem,that might be the end of our society, well, maybe even of civilization. That’s

why Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, because he was having in mind the warsof religion and collective suicide that people were getting close to because of

this disastrous conflict.I think this is what political philosophy should do. So, political

philosophy should never be a merely academic discipline, but always try todeal with real problems that we encounter here and now. And that’s very

difficult, for that—and there’s a link with history here—it presupposes thatthe political philosopher should be able to identify these problems and do

this sooner and in a more satisfactory way than many others. And that’salso where the power and the success of these people like Hobbes andMontesquieu and Kant has been: that they saw the problem before anybody

else saw it, and that they succeeded in conceptualizing it in a superior way.So you have to begin with a certain quasi-historical perception of what time

am I living in, what are the real problems of our time.Well, this has been my motivation to participate in this manifesto for the

liberal party, since I’ve been pondering these problems for a long timealready, and I am worried about the amount of disintegration that you see

in the contemporary political domain and which I had best describe as akind of return to the feudal system. I mean, when liberalism came intobeing, fundamental to all liberalism has been the distinction between

private law and public law. That really meant the end of the feudal world,that you say, well, there is a public reality, that’s public and it cannot be

privatized, this is a part of the world that cannot and should not be ownedby individual persons. What you now see everywhere in the Western world

and probably also in the East, I suppose, is that you have this confusion ofpublic law and private law. And that you have everywhere this most

objectionable ideology of privatization.This results in a strange renaissance of the world of feudalism. I have in

mind here what are called in this country the ZBOs, or Quangos. I don’tknow whether you know this notion of Quango, Quasi-Non-Government-Organization. So it’s something between the government and something

which is also a private company. But it is not either. You get these Quangoswhen the government is too lazy or incapable of taking care properly of one

of its assignments, and then it will say, well, ‘we privatize it and then aprivate company may deal with these nasty problems that we are incapable

of solving’. Then they give to the people in these privatized companies anumber of their public competences, they give them this part of what used

to be part of the legitimate government, and leave them free to deal withthem as they please.

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What you see, next, is that in all these privatized Quangos the salaries ofthe directors are skyrocketing, service declines, nobody feels responsible

anymore for anything, and then you get this feudal situation again. Thenyou get feudal lords all over the place again. In my country, in the

Netherlands, you now have already more Quangos than municipalities.There are by now some 600 of them and together they comprise some 60%

of people working in the public services. All these people live in a kind ofconstitutional limbo, responsible neither to the market—for you have no

competition here—nor to the government, so nobody can get hold of whatthey are doing. Well, once again, that’s the world of the Middle Ages. I find

this profoundly worrying.Then there are a number of people saying, well, ‘this is how it should go’.

This is the case above all with a German scholar whom I very much admire,

as I hasten to add, and who in my view can even be seen as the mostinteresting political philosopher at this moment, namely, Helmut Willke.

But he’s the man who says that this is the direction we should opt for, thatwe must acquiesce in this kind of thing, for better or for worse since this is

the course of history. He rejects the view that you should have a well-defined state, with a well-defined central power in which decisions are

made in a clear and transparent way. His argument is that all this issomething of the past, that we have had, and that we now live in acompletely different world. Now the state is merely a primus inter pares,

merely the first among its equals. These ‘equals’ are the social (sub-)systems, the networks in civil society. But it cannot claim to be more than

that. That’s the argument.Now, if you believe this, I think that means the end of democracy.

Democracy is the democratization of the absolute power it inheritedfrom the governments of the ancien regime. It gave to the people the

competences that had been in the possession of the absolute monarch.This origin of democracy is not something to be regretted, but to be

rejoiced at. So thank God for absolutism. For by shifting absolute powerfrom the King to the people the subjection of the state to the people is noless absolute. And then the biggest political sin is to alienate competences

again from the people by investing them in our new feudal lords, theseQuangos and their self-serving masters. The exercise of political power

is no longer controlled, power is distributed all over society in such away that nobody is properly aware anymore of the sources of power

and how it is organized—and that means the end of responsibility andaccountability.

Moreover, a number of much similar problems are occasioned by theEuropean Union—similar in the sense that the European Union is also

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sadly incapable of organizing political responsibility in a rational andtransparent manner. Take for example this ridiculous constitution drawn

up by Giscard d’Estaing and in which you have the two legislative organs,the council of ministers on the one hand, and these people in Strasbourg,

on the other. Who gets it in his mind to create a state with two legislativebodies, that’s insane! We were supposed to vote for it, in favor of it. The

only thing that you get is that you get confusion. And we should notforget that there are quite a lot of people for whom this constitutional

confusion is a most pleasant windfall and who will most warmly welcomeit. These are all these politicians who are walking in these impenetrable

constitutional clouds and thus may succeed in hiding themselves frompublic control. That is, of course, the realization of the politicians’ dearestdream. So what is evolving in Europe, both on the national and the

supra-national level, is a return to the medieval state. What we call here aPolish Landtag, a Polish Diet. You know a Polish Diet, everyone’s talking

but no decision can be made. So we should get rid as soon as possible ofthis disastrous and profoundly illiberal confusion of private law and

public law.MM: I was not able to read your Liberal Manifesto, but what I read was a

program of the liberal party from the early eighties, where its main goalsvery briefly stated. And these were almost exactly the opposite of what youare saying. Especially, they were underscoring the importance of weakening

of the state, what seemed to me like a traditional idea of economicliberalism.

FA: Weakening the state is not the issue here. My argument is not anargument in favor of investing more power in the state than it presently has

already, on paper at least. What I want is that public power will not besquandered any longer by irresponsible politicians and absolute clarity

about political responsibilities and accountabilities. This is what presentlythe danger is. This is what liberal parliamentary democracy has always been

about. And you see now coming into existence all kind of procedures,which try to evade these mechanisms of parliamentary democracy. This isworrying. Not from the perspective of individualism. I mean everybody is

individualist; even socialists are individualists right now, so fighting forindividualisms is fighting for something that nobody is against, so that this

fight makes no sense anymore. One should fight for things that youconsider important and that others consider to be unimportant. These are

the kind of fights that decide the course of history.MM: You expressed quite a strong opinion about the European Union.

Don’t you think that the idea of the European Union is evolving in theright direction?

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FA: Well, I am very much in favor of the project of the European Union.But it should be undertaken on a sound basis. This is what the European

Constitution did not succeed in doing: it’s an exemplification of theproblems of Europe, but no solution of them. Of course, I’m willing to

grant that the Constitution is better than the Nice Treaty. But under thepresent circumstances this is not sufficient—the main problem with

the European Union has always been what the relationship is between thecommunitarian level and the national level; we have been wrestling with

this problem since 1955, since the very day that the European Communitycame into being. Somehow one always succeeded with a mere muddling

through and in the hope that thing would become better and moremanageable in the future; but now that the EU comprises more thantwenty states, a clear-cut decision has to be reached about this

dilemma. For otherwise the EU will disintegrate into an unworkable PolishDiet. And, once again, the Constitution failed to present such a clear-cut

decision. So, are we going for a federal Europe or are we falling back on thenations? That’s the all-decisive question. Both things are possible and, I

think, workable, Europe on both bases is thinkable. But one has to make upone’s mind about this right now! Muddling through is now no option

anymore.As for myself, I think we should be realistic and prefer the national

option. And if you consistently think out this option, you can develop a

kind of constitution for Europe defining how power and politicalresponsibilities hang together. It would probably mean the end of the

European Parliament and require us to accept the Council of Ministers asthe legitimate source of communitarian political power. And all legitimacy

would then come from the nation-states, not from the Europeans, as apeople. That’s the fiction of the European Parliament we will then have to

abandon.The obvious objection would be that decision-making on a European

scale would then be impossible. You cannot continuously make treatieswith 22 nations. That’s absurd. This is true of course. So I think you willthen need an extra instrument in order to keep things moving. This would,

for me, be the old idea of a L’Europe a deux vitessess—and I have neverunderstood what is wrong with this option. The idea is that you should

abandon the hope of taking decisions unanimously, on a European scale.Instead we should exhort each country to make as many individual

agreements as possible with as many other EU countries as possible. If thereis some truth in the ideology of a united Europe, it automatically follows

that every nation-state will indeed aspire to be involved as much as possiblein agreements that are reached between all the others. If, for example,

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Poland has some agreement with England that is beneficial to both, thenall the other nations will investigate whether they could also join this

agreement. In this way you keep the pressure on—and, in the end, perhapsa federal Europe may then even become possible. So this idea of l’Europe a

deux vitesses, that’s the incentive that would be the motor behind Europeanunification. But if you continue with the system that we presently have—

the system of either there is a law or rule for all of Europe, or there willbe no such law or rule—that’s absolutely hopeless, and that will kill

everything.MM: It’s time to ask my last question, so I will try to go back to the

sublime from the European level. I very much like your remark in yoursublime book, where you wrote that it is not only a book for historians,but it is a book for a continental audience, for a European audience. You

quite often underline this difference between the continental and Anglo-Saxon history in regard to the sublime experience and our collective

suffering. And you make a claim that the current predominance of theUnited States may be interpreted as the ultimate victory of the ancien

regime over the revolution. So, is this current, really overwhelmingdomination of the United States a kind of price that Europe has to pay

for its traumatic past? And what kind of consequences would it have forour future?FA: I guess, from what you’ve said, that my impression should be that

the ancien regime has won in the end. I mean, since 1789 it made senseto say that post-revolutionary Europe is in many ways, and especially

from a social point of view, more modern then the United States. And,well, it’s always my impression, if you go to the United States and if you

talk to the people there, there is a certain kind of ancien regime civilitystill existing there that is no longer around here on the European

Continent. And, well, the answer why this has come into being ishistorically too obvious to be stated. I mean, the United States came into

being in 1776, they had their constitution, and they still idealize thisconstitution as, well, as if it’s a spoken word of God himself. So, anancien regime society is, and has always been, the model for the United

States. Think also that the American Revolution was not in the least asocial revolution in the way this is true of the French Revolution. It was

a war of independence against King George the Third, but it had nosubstantial social dimension. So that’s why this ancien regime could

subsist in the United States down to the present. It’s a pre-revolutionaryancien regime society.

And we, in Continental Europe, are, therefore, the people of afundamentally later dispensation, and for a long time we also had reason

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to believe that our type of society would be our best bet for the future.A very natural reaction, of course, if you observe in the United States this

huge and ever-increasing discrepancy between the people who are rich andthe people who are poor. This is often too painful to look at for a European,

so to speak. But I now realize myself that one cannot infer from this whowill have the future, the USA or Europe. Europe undoubtedly is a better

world, but the very reasons that make into be a better world may also be thereasons that, well, will remove it from the course of history. And the United

States are a less good world, but perhaps that’s why they will be able toshow us the way to the future.

MM: So in the end the gains of the traumatic experiences dominate overthe losses that these imply?FA: Yes, that’s how you could look at it, yes.

Glimmen, The Netherlands, 30 August 2005

Notes

[1] I would like to thank the Marie Curie Fellowships Program for enabling me tospend six months in 2005 at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

[2] Ernst Kossmann (1922 – 2003) taught history at University College London from1957 to 1966 and at Groningen University from 1966 to 1987; he was the mostinfluential Dutch historian in the last decades of the previous century. He owes hisfame, mostly, to his The Low Countries (Kossmann 1978) in which the history ofThe Netherlands and of Belgium since 1780 are taken together. But his mostimportant work has been in the field of the history of political theory.

[3] ‘[W]orauf weist das ungeheure historische Bedurfnis der unbefriedigten modernenKultur, das Umsichsammeln zahhloser anderer Kulturen, das verzehrendeErkennenwollen, wenn nicht auf den Verlust des Mythus, auf den Verlust dermythischen Heimat, des mythischen Mutterschosses? Man frage sich, ob dasfieberhafte und so unheimliche Sichregen dieser Kultur etwas anderes ist als dasgierige Zugreifen und Nach-Nahrung-Haschen des Hungernden—und wermochte einer solchen Kultur noch etwas geben wollen, die durch alles, was sieverschlingt, nicht zu sattigen ist, und bei deren Beruhrung sich die kraftigste,heilsamste Nahrung in ‘‘Historie und Kritik’’ zu verwandeln pflegt?’ (Nietzsche1969, pp. 125 – 126).

[4] Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (Party for Freedom and Democracy).

References

Ankersmit, F. (1983) Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language,Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Den Haag.

Ankersmit, F. (1996) Aesthetic Politics, Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value,Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Ankersmit, F. (2005) Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford University Press, Stanford,CA.

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Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004) Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey,Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Jay, M. (2005) Songs of Experience, Modern American and European Variations on AUniversal Theme, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles andLondon.

Kossmann, E. H. (1978) The Low Countries, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Nietzsche, F. (1969) Die Geburt der Tragodie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus, in

Werke I, ed. Karl Schlechta, Munchen, pp. 125 – 126.

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