Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssuesXVI-1SymposiaOn Sami Pihlström’s Toward a Prag...Taking History Seriously

Symposia
On Sami Pihlström’s Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities

Taking History Seriously

On Sami Pihlström’s Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities
Tullio Viola

Full text

1Sami Pihlström’s latest book (Pihlström 2022) deserves praise for directing our attention to a long-neglected field of study. In laying out the foundations of a new philosophy of the humanities, he rekindles a discussion that had its finest hour in the early twentieth century, particularly within neo-Kantian and hermeneutic philosophy. In doing so from a pragmatist angle, he embraces the spirit of John Dewey’s writings on culture and criticism, along with the more recent contributions of Morton White, Joe Margolis, and others. These writers were dedicated to the idea that philosophy should not confine itself to analyzing specific cultural domains such as art, science, law, or religion, but should bring these analyses together in a more comprehensive “philosophy of culture” (White 2002): a general inquiry into the many ways in which human beings create meaning, including what we traditionally call the humanistic disciplines.

2My contribution will focus on three issues, issues on which I find myself taking a somewhat different view from Pihlström, despite my overall sympathy for his project. The first issue is the question of realism. Pihlström strongly advocates for a realist perspective within the humanities. That is, he claims that the humanities engage with objects that are real and independent of the scholars’ mind. Consequently, he claims that the humanities aim to answer questions about the world that can be said to be true or false. While I am in agreement with this general idea, I believe that Pihlström’s realism comes with a number of implications that warrant further scrutiny. A second and related issue is the “internal perspective” on the humanities that Pihlström derives from his transcendental-pragmatic outlook, as well as his critique of naturalistic approaches, particularly in relation to the study of religion. I will argue for a much less dismissive stance towards naturalistic approaches, not so much in the specific case of religious studies (of which I know too little), as in the study of cultural phenomena more broadly. The third issue revolves around how we define the humanities in the first place, and whether we should develop a more thorough historical understanding of their development than Pihlström has presented in this book.

1. Realism and the Concrete Particulars of History

3Let me start with what I take to be Pihlström’s central concern, namely, to advocate for a realist perspective in the humanities. He describes the philosophical core of his realist perspective as affirming “the mind-independent existence of the objects of humanistic inquiry” (Pihlström 2022: 39). This means not only that there is “a cultural world ‘out there’ independently of individual humanistic scholars’ […] use of concepts, language, and theories” (ibid.: 40); but, more contentiously, that the “theoretical entities” postulated by humanistic scholars “exist and have the properties they do independently of our [individual] conceptualizations, inquiries, and theories” (ibid.: 39). This idea is rooted in a pragmatic-transcendental epistemology that Pihlström has developed in many of his previous writings. According to him, “our social participation in shared practices […] occupies the role of the traditional Kantian transcendental self in the ongoing process of world-constitution through conceptualization and inquiry” (ibid.: 32). The objects and theoretical entities postulated by humanistic scholars are constituted by their practices of inquiry.

4Here, I am particularly interested in Pihlström’s focus on the reality of “theoretical entities.” His transcendental-pragmatic realism goes far beyond what he calls “concrete particulars, such as literary texts or unique historical events” (ibid.: 103-4). It encompasses a range of abstract objects. First, it includes “historical tendencies of development,” or general features of social phenomena that are irreducible to individual instances. (Pihlström gives the example of religious practices that cannot be reduced to individual rituals.) It also includes general concepts or theoretical constructs created by scholars to categorize cultural facts and make them understandable (think of historical categories such as “the Renaissance,” or “the Second World War”), as well as the “various theoretical and interpretive constructions of literary theory and criticism” (ibid.: 89). And it includes meanings – for instance, the meaning of a literary text or a work of art.

5Finally, Pihlström claims that this already diverse list should also encompass possibilities. Reality should be ascribed not only to “the actual meaning(s) of a literary text but also the possible meanings it could take under a plurality of different, possibly conflicting interpretations (even in the event that [we do] not consider all those meanings to really ‘exist’ in the work itself)” (ibid.: 106). Similarly, in the case of historiography, Pihlström believes that we should attribute reality to those “potentialities” of historical phenomena that have not been actualized but can still be explored through counterfactual investigations. For example, historians can meaningfully ask whether Finland “could have avoided” the wars with the Soviet Union because this possibility is a real object, which may be subjected to rational scrutiny (ibid.: 104-5).

6Pihlström has good reasons for developing such a generous form of realism. He wishes to accommodate the pluralistic nature of the humanities and the entanglement of facts and values that they present. It is often observed that two different interpretations of a literary text are not mutually exclusive in the same manner as, say, two physical theories. Granting a degree of reality to a plurality of interpretations within the research practices of scholars (recall Pihlström’s transcendental position) is one way of accounting for this basic fact. Moreover, Pihlström is aware that ascribing reality to a possibility is not the same as reducing it to an actuality. (Peirce’s metaphysics helps him draw this distinction.)

7These caveats notwithstanding, it seems to me that articulating a realist position in terms of theoretical entities – rather than concrete particulars – carries the risk of becoming overly comprehensive. In other words, this metaphysical view may lead us to attribute reality to a potentially infinite variety of concepts, interpretations, and theoretical objects, without having stringent criteria to determine what is and what is not actually plausible. (According to Pihlström, such criteria should not be formulated by philosophy of the humanities, but rather by the particular humanistic disciplines. See ibid.: 108.) Thus, the literary production of, say, Jane Austen, her actual historical existence, and the historically ascertainable meaning of her works, will be placed on an equal ontological footing with interpretations that analyze her texts from contemporary (and potentially anachronistic) theoretical perspectives, or even with “interpretive possibilities” that have never been proposed.

8In the spirit of Pihlström’s hope that his book will be followed by more detailed accounts of how the humanistic disciplines work (ibid.: 79), I wonder whether we should work out a more fine-grained realism than he allows for: a realism that is more attuned to the plurality of metaphysical and epistemological layers encountered in humanistic inquiries. Within this framework, the reality of the concrete particulars of history – such as historical events and historically ascertainable meanings of texts and other artifacts – may deserve a separate discussion from that of unattained historical potentialities or anachronistic interpretations, although the humanities certainly have space for a rational discussion of those as well.

9There is, perhaps, no need to say that my goal is not to resuscitate a rigid dichotomy between facts and interpretations. Rather, I am emphasizing the need to put forth a more nuanced set of distinctions: distinctions that serve not only a descriptive purpose but also a normative one. While denying the reality of the concrete particulars of history can easily lead to skeptical positions regarding historical knowledge, this is often not true of positions that merely highlight the constructed, rather than discovered, character of interpretations, without necessarily questioning their objective validity (in the sense of their being “independent of the vagaries of you and me,” as Peirce 1868/1984: 239 beautifully put it).

10It is indeed crucial to complement Pihlström’s arguments about realism with a detailed analysis of the concept of interpretation, a concept that is often invoked in the book but gets surprisingly little scrutiny. While we may start with a broad definition of interpretation as the operation of assigning meaning to a particular object in relation to a context or practice, we may go on to distinguish various subspecies of the concept, each with different purposes and characteristics. For example, it is one thing to reconstruct the meaning of a text as closely as possible to its context of production. Another is to propose a reading of a text that applies theoretical paradigms external to the work itself or its historical context – for example, a structuralist, feminist or postcolonial paradigm. A detailed exploration of how these different modes of inquiry work seems to me to be one of the most significant avenues that the philosophy of the humanities should explore.

2. Transcendental Philosophy and the Internal Perspective

11Pihlström explores the centrality of interpretation in the humanities in a different sense from the one I have just outlined. He links the concept of interpretation to his transcendental perspective, with the aim of defending a specific methodological position, particularly with regard to religious studies (Pihlström 2022: 157-68). In doing so, he imparts an unexpectedly prescriptive twist to his book. Here, the philosophy of the humanities becomes not so much an analysis of the logic of humanistic inquiry, nor a defense of general ontological or epistemological positions such as realism, but rather a specific prescription of the best method for studying certain topics – in particular religion – from a humanistic perspective.

12His main premise is that one may distinguish two fundamental approaches to the study of religion. The first is naturalistic and reductionist, and seeks a causal explanation of religious phenomena in terms of facts external to religion itself (such as a psychological function or need, or a cognitive mechanism). The second is the more genuinely humanistic one. It provides an interpretation and description of religious facts from a perspective that is internal to the practices themselves. This interpretation is aimed at revealing “the inner meaning of religious practices, as appreciated by the practitioners as they identify themselves as participants of those practices” (ibid.: 166-7). Pihlström is careful to use inclusive, pluralistic language (ibid.: 160, 167). Still, he makes it clear that in his view, the first, external, reductionist approach is susceptible to criticism, not only because it is not genuinely humanistic, but also because it is somehow “irrelevant” (ibid.: 167) or inappropriate for understanding religious facts, both from an epistemological and ethical point of view (ibid.: 158, 164, 168). The crux of his critique is that the reductionist perspective fails to acknowledge the point of view of participants in religious practices (ibid.: 158).

13Despite my very limited expertise in religious studies, I believe this is where my perspective and Pihlström’s diverge the most. Without wishing to deny the value of an internal, interpretive perspective in religious studies, I fail to see the need to create a sharp contrast with studies external to the subject’s own experience. Such studies, focusing, for example, on the mechanisms underlying the propagation of religious ideas, have demonstrated a robust explanatory power. At the cost of appearing overly ecumenical, I would claim that the most interesting challenge for those who feel constrained by the reductionism of certain religious studies is not to question their epistemological, methodological, or even ethical legitimacy, but rather, to integrate their findings into a different perspective.

14Let me try to further elaborate my concerns by taking seriously the analogy Pihlström proposes between religious studies and historical or literary studies, two domains I command much better than the domain of religion. Here again, Pihlström suggests that the most genuinely humanistic viewpoint is anti-reductionist. That is, it refrains from explaining a certain order of events by another. For instance, a genuinely humanistic viewpoint in historiography would resist any reduction of certain historical events to a simple causal chain. Similarly, a genuinely humanist viewpoint in literary studies would honor the literary experience as such, against the reductionist approach that would involve trying to reduce literature to something else, say “mere psychological activity taking place in reading and writing” (ibid.: 165). With regard to the latter example, I disagree with the premise of Pihlström’s argument, namely, the idea that humanistic studies of literature should always give center stage to the internal perspective of people participating in the experience of enjoying works of literature for the sake of what we may call their literary value. For not only is something like literary experience by no means a historical constant or the only reason people approach literary texts. But even more fundamentally, what we may call “external” perspectives to literary works may provide vital information that allows us to better understand our object of study. Just to give some examples, linguistics teaches us about the working mechanism of poetic language; sociology explores the social construction of taste; psychology and cognitive sciences may study the dynamics of transformation and propagation of artistic objects; and so forth.

15The main philosophical point here is that even if we wish to focus on the aesthetic experience associated with the production and consumption of literary texts (which is by no means the only possible perspective we can take), we need not see this aesthetic experience as somehow “limited” by external knowledge. On the contrary, it may well be enriched by it, as our perception becomes sharper and our understanding more sophisticated.

16On a more general note, my sense is that Pihlström’s emphasis on the “internal perspective” of humanistic disciplines risks overshadowing another significant and legitimate perspective in the humanistic study of cultural facts, namely, the inherently interdisciplinary investigation of human beings’ capacity to handle symbols across various forms of experience. I may, perhaps, clarify what I mean here by allowing myself a brief historical-philosophical digression. I find it curious that Pihlström does not refer more directly in his book to early twentieth-century neo-Kantianism, which not only dealt extensively with a philosophy of the humanities (in German, the Geistes- or Kulturwissenschaften), but did so from a broadly transcendental standpoint. If we look at the work of Ernst Cassirer, we will notice that he linked the transcendental perspective he inherited from the Marburg school to pragmatic or even pragmatist inspirations, in a manner reminiscent what Pihlström wants to achieve.

17Cassirer’s use of the transcendental perspective, however, was different from Pihlström’s. His main preoccupation was to show how each different “symbolic form” – e.g., science, myth, religion, language, and art – displays a different and irreducible way of articulating the world. Studying the inner workings of these symbolic forms does not mean offering internal interpretations of what it means to the practitioners of myth, science, religion, or art to participate in those practices, as Pihlström contends. It means exploring the specific ways in which symbols are created, used, and transmitted in each of those practices within the general framework of human sense-making. To do this, empirical and interdisciplinary data (for instance the data of anthropology, psychology, and literary studies) are key.

18In other words, Cassirer took transcendental philosophy to be the basis for an investigation into the different ways in which human beings constitute their cultural world out of different symbolic articulations of their environment. This interpretation diverges significantly from Pihlström’s understanding of transcendental philosophy. For Pihlström, embracing the transcendental perspective primarily entails affirming the reality of one’s object of research (e.g., religious facts) as a necessary condition for an inquiry into that object (ibid.: 165-6).

19To wrap up this section on transcendental philosophy and the internal perspective, let me note a connection between what Pihlström says about religion and his observations about how we should investigate historical phenomena that seem to reach beyond the limits of human experience – the paradigm of which is the Holocaust. Here again, Pihlström emphasizes that the most important role of the humanities is not so much to accumulate empirical data that will explain the phenomenon from a purely causal perspective, but rather to provide richly textured interpretations aimed at doing full justice to the horror bordering on incomprehensibility that the Holocaust represents for us. While I fully share Pihlström’s ethical stance, I am much less convinced that one should therefore conclude that the Holocaust “is not a mere ‘historical fact’ but a metaphysical disruption violating […] ethical constraints or even the very idea of ethics” (ibid.: 177).

20This assertion takes up the famous philosophical-historical thesis of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, a thesis that has been debated at least since the time of the Historikerstreit. However, Pihlström turns this thesis into a metaphysical proposition and thereby magnifies it. For Pihlström, the question is not so much whether we can compare the Holocaust to other historical cases of genocide, crimes against humanity, or mass murder (as was the case in the Historikerstreit), but more fundamentally, whether we can study it as a historical fact at all. This leads him to make a surprising exception to his own realism. He claims that “[n]o straightforward realism is […] possible about an event such as the Holocaust.” The Holocaust, he claims, cannot be comprehended in the same way that other historical events can: “to claim to comprehend the Holocaust is to make an unethical attempt to appropriate this historical ‘fact’” (ibid.: 178).

21A full assessment of this last sentence is difficult because the verb “to comprehend” is ambiguous. It may refer to the act of grasping the reasonableness of something, or of mentally appreciating the reasons or motives that led to a certain event. This is the sense in which Auschwitz survivor and writer, Primo Levi (1968/2015), claimed that “to comprehend” the Holocaust is impossible. (Although Levi also hastened to add that “to know” as many historical truths about the Holocaust through painstaking historical work is “necessary.”) However, if Pihlström’s view is that we should not attempt to explain the Holocaust historically like we do with other historical facts, I believe it should be rejected. I do not believe that any serious historian thinks they will ever be able to “comprehend” the Holocaust in the sense of exhausting its ethical or metaphysical significance. This significance is, when not utterly unfathomable, perhaps more likely to be explored by other means, such as ethics, art, literature, or religion. But this does not mean that historical research is less valuable, or that a true “historical understanding” of the Holocaust is not as legitimate as understanding any other complex historical phenomenon. On the contrary, to study the minutest details of the Holocaust is to make any other reflection – ethical, political, literary, religious, and perhaps even metaphysical – more rigorous and well-founded. Here, I return to a point I have made earlier when discussing literary studies. As a general rule, I believe we should move from the assumption that the “external” understanding of a cultural or social phenomenon should not be seen as impairing our interpretative capacity, but rather as sharpening it.

22Let me reiterate my point from a slightly different angle by briefly referring to one of the historians who has most thoroughly scrutinized the limits of the representability and comprehensibility of the Holocaust, namely Saul Friedländer. Friedländer insisted that it is illegitimate to “historicise” Nazism in the same way as one does with any other period of European history. As he put it: “[w]riting about Nazism is not like writing about sixteenth-century France” (Friedländer 1988: 19). Pihlström may appear to be following Friedländer’s position here. However, even Friedländer had no trouble admitting that “historicisation, understood in its most general sense as the approach to the Nazi era with all the methods at the disposal of the historian and without any forbidden questions, is self-evident” (ibid.: 10). I do not know to what extent Pihlström would agree with this. But in the spirit of working out a robust realist epistemology for the humanities, it seems to me necessary to insist on this point, since the greatest danger of trivializing or relativizing the Holocaust currently comes not from those who want to treat it as a historical phenomenon, but from those who cultivate skeptical or openly negationist attitudes.

3. Philosophy and History of the Humanities

23Let me close my contribution with a very quick word on a topic that would actually deserve much more space, namely the relationship between the philosophy of the humanities and the history of the humanities – a field of study that, as Pihlström himself notes, has recently been gaining ground, partly as a result of the creation of specialized journals. When it comes to defining his object of study, Pihlström cultivates a healthy pluralist attitude, suggesting that what counts as a humanistic discipline cannot be decided a priori, but should take its cue from what practitioners of humanistic disciplines actually do. Yet, we have seen in the previous section that, in at least two instances (his discussion of religious studies and of the Holocaust), his argumentation takes a prescriptivist direction. Particularly with regard to religious studies, Pihlström relies on a very specific conception of the humanities as disciplines internal to the very practices that produce their object of research.

24More generally, the humanities, for Pihlström, are interpretative disciplines that address “meaningful objects” (i.e. objects to which we are willing to attribute significance) and support their interpretations through the analysis of “documents that purportedly themselves refer to such objects and events” (Pihlström 2022: 82-3). This is no doubt a plausible definition and one with a very distinguished pedigree. It is, nonetheless, worth recalling that, from a historical perspective, the humanistic disciplines encompass much more than this definition allows for, as recent studies have shown. (See, e.g., Bod 2013, who emphasizes the humanities’ ability to produce general patterns of explanation, not unlike the natural sciences, rather than interpretations of particular objects). It is important to keep this historical perspective in mind whenever we set out to define the very concept of “the humanities” or discuss its value.

25But we can go one step further. A more robust historical perspective on the development of the humanities will not just make our understanding of these disciplines more nuanced and self-aware, but will also assist in addressing specific philosophical issues. Philosophers of the humanities would benefit significantly from establishing a collaboration with their more historically oriented colleagues, on the model of the collaboration between the history and philosophy of science. Building on a recent proposal by Herman Paul (2020) – who suggested doing exactly that in the field of the philosophy of historiography – we might argue for studies that delve into how humanistic inquirers wrote, read, cited, used their sources, visited archives, exchanged letters and ideas. In parallel, we will need studies that can leverage this body of information to tackle specific philosophical questions. (See Currie 2023 for a good example of this approach.) Indeed, the project of grounding philosophical discussions in meticulous historical analyses of scientific practices could become a fellow traveler in Pihlström’s timely endeavor to articulate a philosophy of the humanities from a pragmatist perspective.

Top of page

Bibliography

Bod Rens, (2013), A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press.

Currie Adrian, (2023), “Narratives, Events & Monotremes: The Philosophy of History in Practice,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 17(2), 265-87. Online: doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341500.

Friedländer Saul, (1988), “Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism,” German Politics & Society, 13, 9-21.

Levi Primo, (2015 [1968]), “Foreword to Auschwitz by Léon Poliakov,” in Ann Goldstein (ed.), The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 2, New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1189-90.

Paul Herman, (2020), “History and Philosophy of History (HPH). A Call for Cooperation,” in Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (ed.), Philosophy of History: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, London, Bloomsbury, 165-79.

Peirce Charles S., (1984 [1868]), “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, ed. by Edward C. Moore, 2, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 211-42

Pihlström Sami, (2022), Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities, Albany, State University of New York Press.

White Morton, (2002), A Philosophy of Culture. The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Tullio Viola, Taking History SeriouslyEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XVI-1 | 2024, Online since 17 May 2024, connection on 12 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/3965; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/11p52

Top of page

About the author

Tullio Viola

Maastricht University

t.viola[at]maastrichtuniversity.nl

By this author

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search