i. Introduction
In stanza XXVII of the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, dating to the fourteenth-century and originally composed in Middle English by an author who we cannot now name, Gawain is described as wearing the sign of the pentangle. The anonymous author uses this as a figure for the unified, virtuous character of the knight, highlighting his perfect and unbreakable combination of Liberality, Loving-kindness, Continence, Courtesy and Piety:
These pure five
Were more firmly fixed on that fine man Than on any other, and every multiple, Each interlocking with another, had no end, Being fixed to five points which never failed, Never assembling on one side, nor sundering either,
With no end at any angle; nor can I find where the design started Or proceeded to its end.331
The individual virtues and their combined virtuousness are represented by formal and physical properties. Formally, we have number (five), symmetry (‘never assembling on
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one side’), infinity (‘no end’), and unity (‘nor sundering either’). Physically, or perhaps even mechanically, we have the fixed ‘interlocking’ angles with their unfailing points. The pentangular representation shows us the formal unity of Gawain’s character. Clearly, however, this virtuous character also consists in physical actions where the formal, moral properties of Gawain manifest. The five points do not fail, on any given occasion, because of the interlocking of the virtues. Gawain’s entire constitution contributes to his steadiness at the lance.332 Not only is there a moral unity in the
diversity of Gawain’s actions, the unity of the pentangle itself as a representation is a ‘unification’ of the ‘diversity’ of Gawain’s many deeds.333
Frank Ankersmit has claimed a similar representational unity for works of history understood as historical representations. His theory of this is one of the most
philosophically involved attempts to justify a version of a doctrine which has been in the ascendency in the philosophy of history since the 1970s: narrativism or (more fundamentally) representationalism.334 According to representationalism, works of
history are essentially representations. If we add the thought that such representations are essentially narrative, we get narrativism. To analyse the notion of representation, Ankersmit has drawn substantially on the later metaphysical system of Leibniz as presented in ‘The Principles of Philosophy’, more commonly known as ‘The
Monadology’ (1714).335 As with Gawain and the pentangle of knightly virtues, here I
want to suggest that the potential historiographical value in Ankersmit’s appeal to the
332 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 72-74 (stanzas XLIX and L). 333 Cf. Ricoeur 1983: 9-10.
334 Ankersmit 2012; and 2001, 1994, 1983. There are, of course, other ‘representationalists’ or ‘narrativists’: see for examples White 1973 and Ricoeur 1983-1985. Ankersmit used to write about ‘narrative substances’ but now he discusses ‘historical representations’; here I have emphasised what I take to be the strong continuity in the essentials of his thinking.
335 See Leibniz [1714] 1989: 213-224 for an English translation and Leibniz 1991 for a parallel French text.
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Monadology lies in what it might reveal about the place of action in historical representations.
So far, I do not think that Ankersmit has articulated how his formal monadological theory relates to the content of works of history. Once, in answer to a question from Marek Tamm, Ankersmit suggests that Leibniz’ monads, and therefore his own
historical representations, ‘can be rescued from complete isolation’ if we see that they are compatible with the ‘relational facts’ that sustain phenomena.336 Yet never has he
made an attempt is made to make more of this, to provide a principled and illuminating linkage with the details – the ‘phenomena’ – of historiography. Consequently, it is hard to see what is essentially historical or historiographical in his theory of representation. The problem with this in turn is that it makes it difficult to derive any insights about particular examples of historiography. Yet, while Ankersmit might argue that
generality is in the nature of his approach (see below), I think the gap can be bridged. My main proposal is that Ankersmit’s theory can be extended to make a connection with action clear by treating historical representations as necessarily historical in virtue of being representations of historically specific situations. The most important sort of ‘relational facts’ in history are features of situations which alter the ranges of possible actions which seem to characterise the time and place. A more intuitive and less ambitious version of this idea is available in relation to the moral representation of Gawain.
Gawain’s virtuous and apparently pentangular character consists in his deeds and in the significance of his quest, and any light the representation offers depends on this
connection. However, to grasp what the author of Sir Gawain says about Gawain by
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employing such a representation is not just to grasp what he (Gawain) actually did. It is to be in possession of a representation which grounds expectations about the relevant range of possibilities for his action – the parameters within which he acts. The significance of what he actually does is at least partially to be found in what it tells us about what he might do. Whatever situation Gawain is put in, we expect him not to run away; if he becomes hungry, we expect him not to steal from the poor – noblesse oblige. This moral representation of Gawain the individual is consistent with a range of possible actions, but this range (however impossible it is to finish listing everything in it) has limits. To grasp the representation is to have a sense – however intuitive – of these limits, and consequently of the ranges of possible actions characteristic of Gawain. I think Ankersmitian historical representation achieves something similar. Yet, the central difference is that historiography is concerned with the possibilities characteristic of historically specific situations and contexts instead of the moral character of a single man – whom at any rate in this case is mythological.
Perhaps a particular action of Gawain’s is explained, morally, by the representation: he acts thusly because he is thus. This sort of explanation works by subsuming some particulars (e.g. actions) under a more general concept (e.g. of Gawain’s character). Philosophers of history have sometimes suggested that this is how narratives perform an explanatory operation.337 The problem is that in the absence of a very resolute
psychological theory his being thus is hard to separate from his acting thusly, so the sort of representation we have of his character is something more suggestive and less
explicit than a fully perspicacious concept or a complete theory.338 Ankersmit accepts
the same point for statements in a historical representation.339 The narrow moral
337 Ricoeur 1983: 286-301; also McDonald & MacDonald 2011: 136-7 in Tucker 2011. 338 A classic statement of this issue in virtue ethics is McDowell 1979: 331-50.
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representation of Gawain (the pentangle) is dependent on the broader representation of his actions in the rest of Sir Gawain. Indeed, each and every action of Gawain’s there testifies to his character. We might, of course, get engrossed in the details of the narrative – Sir Gawain is a medieval “page-turner” – but each episode in the quest of Gawain elucidates the representation of his moral character. Each action, then, has a double function. It has a narrative function in so far as it takes place in sequence with other events. It also has what we might call a constitutive function in so far as it contributes to our sense of the individual character involved in the narrative. As the narrative progresses, new actions are added to the constitution of Gawain’s character. As more actually happens in the narrative, our sense of what could happen changes as well: the more we learn about Gawain’s character, the more we grasp what he might do. The pentangle is there precisely to remind us that Gawain has multiple capacities and firm limits in his action; this is what his virtuousness consists in. A moral
representation of this sort is therefore integrally connected with a particular sort of
content: Gawain’s actions, possible and actual.
Here I want to explore a similar line of development for Ankersmit’s conception of
historical representation. The matter is of course much more complex when we lack a single person whose moral character we are focussed on. Nonetheless, some of the same starting-points apply already given Ankersmit’s theory. As I will explain in more detail below, Ankersmit thinks all the statements in a work of history contribute to the historical representation it carries. He appeals to Leibniz for an account of exactly how this works (more on this below). Just like Gawain’s actions, even though each
statement carries us further through the narrative of the text, simultaneously it also carries out its constitutive function in relation to the overall representation. The only trouble I see with this is that we lack an intuitive analogy for the moral character or soul
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history are typically written about – and which provide the content for historical representations, in Ankersmit’s terms. Below, I will use a brief example from
Montaillou. As we have seen, there LeRoy Ladurie conveys the daily life and historical situation of about two-hundred and fifty people over thirty years, analysing things like sexual relations, forms of labour, individual personalities, the impact of inquisition, and the place of women. Can such a book itself really have a single unified soul, as
Ankersmit thinks it must?
In Ankersmit’s theory, a given historical representation is an invisible posit enabling a much more general view of historiographical truth and knowledge (more on this below too). Yet, if we can find a way to carry-over the other features of Gawain’s character through its moral representation, then we will have found a way to make these posits
visible – to show that Ankersmit’s theory has substantial consequences for how we are to understand the details represented in historiography. This includes the centrality of
action to historical representations, and the importance of possibilities and limits in the constitution of the representation – all features, at least, of Gawain’s moral character.
To support my proposal for supplementing Ankersmit’s theory, I offer the following phases of discussion. First, I introduce the core of Ankersmit’s representationalism in relation to Leibniz (§2). Next, there is a preliminary I need to mention briefly in advance of my own suggestions (§3): I show that despite some received ideas about Leibniz, the ideas about action and possibilities I rely on are not ruled-out by
Ankersmit’s dependence on the Monadology. After this, I argue that there is room for judging Ankersmit’s theory by independent – non-Leibnizian – criteria in the
philosophy of history, and I offer an account of the relevant criteria (§4). According to these criteria, in addition to Ankersmit’s formal theory of representation, we also need to establish a principled argument connecting this theory with real historiography and a
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demonstration of how this argument applies. This is what I aim to provide. My principled argument (§5) shows how the formal properties of historical representations enable them to represent highly complex situations where historically characteristic possibilities for action are grounded in multiple and mutually dependent conditions. I then demonstrate how this argument applies in an idealised case (§6) before turning to show how it applies in the same way but more complexly in a real case: Montaillou
(§7). I conclude by highlighting a novel consequence of my extension of Ankersmit’s theory which would reward further attention (§8): event-condition duality for actions in historiography, where actions are at once events in themselves and conditional
contributions to historically specific situations. Later I offer some more precise ways to think about this ‘duality’ and why it is important. My main effort to begin with,
however, is devoted to extending Ankersmit’s particular version of representationalism. Further issues are isolated for discussion in subsequent sections.
ii. Ankersmit and the Monadology
Sometimes Ankersmit’s ideas are cited to support general positions about the status of historical knowledge or the nature of historical truth.340 His own recent work has
encouraged this, confronting major themes in philosophy of language, epistemology, and aesthetics with his alternative representationalist theory.341 Here I want to put such
cataclysms aside and focus on the details – and potential – of Ankersmit’s notion of representation itself. Leibniz’ theory of monads has helped Ankersmit to explain his
340 See 2011 Southgate: 540, 548 in Tucker 2011; the extent to which Ankersmit is really a
‘postmodernist’ as Southgate suggests – whatever that really means – is I think still in doubt: see Saari 2005: 5-21 and Ankersmit’s reply, Ankersmit 2005: 23-33.
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novel view of what a historical representationis.342 Leibniz proposed that the basic
substances of the God-created universe are monads. A monad is taken to be a perceiving and perfectly individual substance constituting a point of view in the universe. Composites of monads are then interrelated through mutual perception.343
Sometimes a single monad dominates others in a composite. Such composites form the phenomena which we ordinarily take to be real, such as physical objects and individual creatures (people and animals). Yet, the difficulty of the monad concept has sustained Leibniz scholarship since his death in 1716, and a brief summary is likely to give a false – or at least premature – impression about the clarity of the concept itself and the
unanimity to be found among its interpreters.344
Nonetheless, there is at least one very clear analogy between Ankersmit’s conception of
historical representations and Leibniz’ theory of monads. A monad is a basic
individual, and in so far as it exists God has given it a ‘Complete Individual Concept’345
containing all its predicates. The monad giving the essential identity of a person, for instance, will be defined by the Complete Individual Concept containing the predicates expressing what ordinarily we would think of as the actions and accidents of the person’s course through life. Similarly, for Ankersmit a historical representation is a ‘strong individual’ defined by a Complete Individual Concept formed of all the
342 Ankersmit’s mentions of Leibniz, while frequent enough to make documenting them unnecessary, are often elusive. For example, neither Meaning, Truth, and Reference nor a recent article involves any explicit references to Leibniz own writing despite him being named as the source of various ideas. See Ankersmit 2013: esp. 406-11. A certain amount of exegetical reconstruction is therefore required. The idea of the ‘Complete Individual Concept’ which I focus on here as the core of Ankersmit’s theory captures something present in the Monadology (see §11) and the ‘Discourse on Metaphysics’ (§§8, 9) – for the latter see Leibniz 1989: 40-42. That Ankersmit depends on Leibniz is not in doubt, and in at least one place he expressly associates Leibniz’ philosophy with the theory of monads or ‘monadology’; see Ankersmit & Tamm 2016: 502.
343 See Crane 2017: 89-95.
344 I mention some recent interpretations below.
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statements contained in a work of history.346 For Ankersmit, statements in a work of
history are predicates of the historical representation it offers. Together they define a
monad-esque individual. In neither case – Leibniz nor Ankersmit – do we have a unitary individual independently of its predicates.347 The main consequence of
Ankersmit’s adopting this view as a theory of historiography is that statements no longer function in historiography as separable, individual claims about the past. Rather, each of them contributes to the definition of a holistic historicalrepresentation which is ‘about’ the past. The core of Ankersmit’s view is that in history we always construct a representation of this sort, and that we never get at the past directly – as if quotidian linguistic structures in the present were simply to be reproduced when we talk about the historical past.348
Ankersmit explains that his sort of representation is no longer a two-place operation, as in the way we might think of a declarative utterance (p) bearing a representational relationship (R2) with its truth-makers (t): R2pt. Ankersmit thinks this sort of
description involving reference fails to provide a good model for how we represent history. Rather, every statement in a work of history becomes a predicate of the historical representation, now understood as an intermediary component (r) in a three- place operation of representation (R3). For any p, representation can now be understood
as: r is p about thepast. I have underlined the relations involved in the operation. The is indicates the ‘is’ of predication, and this captures Ankersmit’s view that all the statements of a work of history come together in the same, very precisely defined historical representation. The Complete Individual Concept for a given historical representation will look like this: r is p1…px about the past. But what about the past is
346 Ankersmit 2013
347 Catherine Wilson disputes this with regard to some contexts: see e.g. Wilson 2001. 348 I put aside the issue of whether we can have a historical understanding of the present.
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represented? Well, Ankersmit is committed to saying that we cannot define this independently of a historical representation, so the aboutness relation involves what he calls ‘speaking about speaking’. To talk about the content of the representation, we either mention the predicates of the representation itself – p1…px – or perhaps, try to
describe this set in looser terms. (“Well, really it’s about social reconstruction after the Justinian plague.”) We cannot get behind this representational lens, so we will always have to go through it. Although Ankersmit does not want to sever ‘all ties between representation and the world’, he does think that we have to approach these ties through our language, and that our historical language is necessarily representational in the holistic way I have summarised.349
This view cuts in two directions. Firstly, it offers an alternative to any model of past- tense reference which treats the individual utterance as the relevant unit for analysis. For example, Michael Dummet’s idea of maintaining a subjunctive ‘truth-value link’ between utterances in the present with truth-makers in the past suggests we hold that p
uttered now about the past at t1 is true if it would have been correct to utter p at t1.350
The subjunctive can be relied on in so far as we have access to reliable inferential procedures which free us from the need to take a direct view of the past. John