Wesleyan University

The Irony of Nihilism

Author(s): Eugene O. Golob
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 4, Beiheft 19: Metahistory: Six Critiques (Dec., 1980),
pp. 55-65
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504889
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 THE IRONY OF NIHILISM

EUGENE 0. GOLOB

Hayden White intended his Metahistory to be a contribution "to the current

discussion of the problem of historical knowledge" (1). And with a faith in
his own work that is entirely proper, and perhaps necessary to an author of
serious intent, he believed he had shown that "the best grounds for choosing
one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or
moral, rather than epistemological" (xii), so that historians and philosophers
of history are now "freed to conceptualize history, to perceive its contents,
and to construct narrative accounts of its processes in whatever modality of
consciousness is most consistent with their own moral and aesthetic aspira-
tions" (434). In short, White wished to close the discussion by proving ir-
relevant "a literature which, taken as a whole, justifies serious doubts about
history's status as either a rigorous science or a genuine art" (2).
This statement helps to place White in relation to the debate which occupied
the attention of a good many Anglo-American thinkers and transplanted
Europeans for twenty-five years after World War II. As represented in well
known teaching anthologies' it is basically an argument between positivists
such as Hempel and idealists such as Collingwood. The positivist position
holds that there is one and only one scientific method (best exemplified in
physics), and genuine historical or any other kind of knowledge has to be
founded upon this method and its search for universal laws or statements of
statistical probability. It is the claim of the positivists that, however they
express their findings, historians do in fact presuppose such laws or state-
ments. The contrary view of the idealists is that human actions are sharply
to be distinguished from events in nature, that they arise out of human think-
ing, willing and desiring, that the mind is capable of reenacting human thought,
and that it is the job of history to study these concrete acts of thought, will,
and desire in their individuality. This view asserted the autonomy of history.

1. Such as that of W. H. Dray, Philosophical Analysis and History (New York,

1966) - cited by White, 2 - Patrick Gardiner, Theories of History (New York, 1955),
and The Philosophy of History (Oxford, 1974).

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56 EUGENE 0. GOLOB

Positivism, like a multinational conglomerate, wants to add history to its

holdings, while idealism insists upon history's autonomy.2
Hayden White, in effect, rendered a Scotch verdict of not proven in the
case of positivism's claim to custody of history, but he did not accept that
history has indeed established its autonomy. An autonomous discipline has its
own canons of method, knowledge, and proof: in a word. it is a science.
White judged the status of history by those criteria he associated with the
physical sciences, and inferred that the perpetual disagreement among his-
torians over both causal laws and forms of explanation proved that history
had failed to measure up (12). For White, "the nonscientific or proscien-
tific nature of historical studies is signaled in the inability of historians to
agree - as the natural scientists of the seventeenth century were able to do
on a specific mode of discourse" (428).
Having failed to become a science, history "like the human sciences in
general remained indentured to the vagaries, but also to the generative cap-
ability, of natural language throughout the nineteenth century - and it is so
indentured today" (428). Thus it becomes subject to the laws of another
science, call it linguistic, rhetorical, or structural science, in which, according
to White's version of these laws, statements about human affairs are a matter
of moral or aesthetic disposition, and are neither true nor false, correct nor
incorrect.
Metahistory exemplified one particular moment in our intellectual life.
Supported by vigorous movements in the study of literature and of language,
from the New Criticism and its critics to structuralism and semiotics, and en-
compassing several schools of linguistics, rhetoric, for the second time since
the Middle Ages, appeared to be challenging philosophy in their 2500-year-old
competition. Metahistory was an effort to assert for formalist and rhetorical
thinking a primacy over the analytical and empirical modes of thought which,
save for the rhetorical challenge of the Italian Renaissance, had vied between
them for domination of the Western mind since the time of Grosseteste and
Roger Bacon, if not of Gerbert of Aurillac and St. Anselm. Aligning himself
with the rhetoricians, but remaining apart from the throng engaged in their
internal literary-critico-structuralist-linguisticist battles, he made this bold
effort to capture for formalism and rhetoric the ancient field of history, and
end the autonomy it had so recently won.

It will be noted that White's "not proven" verdict on the positivist claim to
history actually incorporates the presuppositions of positivism in suggesting
that history is either nonscientific or unsuccessfully trying to become a science.
Hence his claim that by his approach historians were "freed to conceptualize

2. Although to state it so simply is obviously unjust not only to the principals but
to the many sophisticated,learned participantson both sides.

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 THE IRONY OF NIHILISM 57
history, to perceive its contents" and then to write their narratives according
to their moral and aesthetic "aspirations" (434, my emphasis). Again he
writes, "different historians stress different aspects of the same historical field,
the same set or sequence of events" (274, my emphasis). Now this is the
language of positivism which has the events of history, like the events of
physics, transpiring somehow "out there" and being perceived by the his-
torian-observer. White ignores the counter-argument, that human history
consists of human actions, which are phenomena to be perceived only in their
externals, but which in their inner character, as acts of mind, must be under-
stood. But neither does White urge positivism, for a positivist must observe
phenomena and gauge them according to agreed standards or measures.
White does indeed speak as if the phenomena were "out there" to "observe,"
but, having conceded that positivism had not produced for historical study
the necessary conventions, much less the laws, he turned instead
to construct a verbal model of the historical process, or some part of it, which,
by virtue of its status as a linguistic artifact, can be broken down into the levels
of lexicon, grammar,syntax and semantic.If I proceed in this way, I am permitted
to assert [my emphasis]that differenthistoriansstress differentaspects of the same
historicalfield, the same set or sequence of events, because they actually see dif-
ferent objectsin that field. (274)
It is White's positivist presuppositions, therefore, that allow him to assume a
positivist view of the content of history, to show that history cannot measure
up to the standards of positivist science, and to conclude that the only re-
maining base for history to work from is linguistic. In short, White refused
to give genuine consideration to the argument that history is an autonomous
mode, and he proceeded as if that argument had not been made.3
But the great positivist debate actually went the other way. The autonomy
of history became evident in the very fact of the failure of the positivist
takeover bid.4 There was in fact a slow and quiet convergence among serious
historians, a tacit shedding of preordained causal sequences and ineluctable
regularities, a search in all branches of the discipline for the way people small
and great thought and enacted their thoughts in daily living, in processes of
long duration as well as, in periods of intense crisis; a seeking after con-
sciousness, mentality, or even mentality. The positivist-idealist debate finally
lagged not, as White supposes, because historians could not agree, but be-
cause they began to agree, and the influence of positivism rapidly waned.
But, because he saw things tilting if not proven the other way, he did not
actively consider the position maintained, with differences among them, by

3. Although he cites not only Collingwood's Idea of History but Louis 0. Mink's
"Autonomy of Historical Understanding," by far the most penetrating and effective
explication of the autonomy of history, in History and Theory 5 (1965), 25-47.
4. Lesser takeover bids by Freudians and quantifiers have ended in the partial as-
similation of both within autonomous history.

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58 EUGENE 0. GOLOB

Collingwood, Walsh, Oakeshott, Mink, Dray, Danto, Skinner, and many

others. He recognized that their opponents had not won, but he assumed they
had lost.
It is an interesting group of writers he cites as sharing his disillusionment
with what we might call ordinary, orthodox history: "Continental European
thinkers - from Valery and Heidegger to Sartre, Levi-Strauss and Michel
Foucault - have cast serious doubts on the value of a specifically 'historical'
consciousness, stressed the fictive character of historical reconstructions, and
challenged history's claim to a place among the sciences" (1). And, at the
end of the book, having shown to his own satisfaction that nineteenth-century
historians gravitated toward an ironic mode, White declares that
In the work of writers and thinkers as different as Malraux, Yeats, Joyce, Spen-
gler, Toynbee, Wells, Jaspers,Heidegger, Sartre,Benjamin,Foucault, Lukacs, and
a host of others, contemporaryhistorical thinking (emphasis added) sets along-
side the Irony of professional historiography,and as possible alternativesto it,
conceptions of the historical process which are cast in the modes of Metaphor,
Metonymy, and Synecdoche, each with its own strategiesof explanationand each
with an ideological implicationthat is unique to it. When it is a matter of choos-
ing among these alternative visions of history, the only grounds for preferring
one over anotherare moral or aestheticones. (433)
Historians form an open and welcoming guild, and I suppose even obviously
antihistorical thinkers, poets, theologians, and culture critics might somehow
qualify. But the interesting thing is that White excludes the professionals,
both historians and philosophers of history. They are invited to change their
ways not because their ways are "wrong," though possibly "unscientific" by
positivist standards, but because some other people who are not historians
- an ill assortment of intellectuals whose common ground is antagonism to
history - do not like what the historians are doing.
It is clear that the force of White's invitation hangs entirely on the claim
that history cannot tell the truth about what happened in the past, that the
stories it does tell are formed upon preconceived patterns, and that the choice
among the latter must therefore be made not according to the relative accuracy
of the patterns, the degrees to which they do approach the truth, but rather
according to moral and aesthetic predisposition. The patterns, of course, can-
not be tested for accuracy, because they are blank forms until fleshed out
with the stories hung upon them; and the stories cannot be compared for
accuracy because they differ in respect not of some objective criterion, but
of their differing patterns. So White claims - and if his claim is just, so is
his conclusion - that how one writes history is a matter of moral or aesthetic
predisposal, and that truth is not a relevant concept. A strong claim, and a
nihilistic conclusion.
And yet White offers little to support it. Having shown that there can be

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 THE IRONY OF NIHILISM 59
no history without an implicit philosophy - a point accepted by all parties
to the great positivist debate - and having gone on to make the very inter-
esting point that there can be no theory of history that does not at least imply
its own narration of history-as-transpired (with which I believe Collingwood
would have agreed) White leaps to the conclusion that we are in a kind of
vicious hermeneutic circle.
White makes much of the fact that history and narrative fiction closely
resemble each other, and that imagination necessarily enters into the forma-
tion of narrative. In making the same points, however, Collingwood showed
with great precision how evidence limited the formation of historical narra-
tive and how it disciplined imagination, so that the historian was constrained
to say only what his evidence obliged him to say. What the particular his-
torian inferred from a batch of evidence, how his a priori imagination worked
with it, depended upon the furniture of that historian's mind. The author of
Speculum Mentis, The Principles of Art, and The New Leviathan would be the
very last to deny the presence and power of moral and aesthetic predisposi-
tions. But for Collingwood all thought was a quest for truth (even if many
conclusions could only be "interim reports"). To think "P is the same as Q"
without thinking that "It is true that P is the same as Q" is impossible.
By contrast, the quest for truth is absent from Metahistory.5 White con-
cedes of course that each of his historians thought he was after the truth and
that he had got it and the others had not. Since they differed, however, they
were all right and all wrong and were merely creating narratives according to
their moral or aesthetic preferences. But the fact that historians differ does
not necessarily mean that some are wrong and others possibly right. It invites,
rather, the question: What is there about historical thinking that produces
this circumstance? This is a simple question for the positivist, for, since his-
torical action is conceived as events (phenomena) which the historian must
observe, it can be understood only by subsumption under proper laws or
by being ranged within less decisive but nonetheless explanatory probabilistic
statements. On this basis, when there are disagreements some judgments are
necessarily wrong, arising from errors in research or evaluation. But this
view has simply not made headway among working historians, and it would
appear that it is this rejection that White has in mind when he cites historians'
failure to agree as one of the reasons for his offering a new way.
But that is not the only way to answer the question. If the stuff of history
consists not of phenomena, as in physics, but of human actions, the his-
torian must consider both the inside and the outside of these actions.
Thought, purpose, motive, customs, conceptual framework -these are the

5. On the face of it, that is. But, of course,Whitethinkshis renderingof the state
of affairsis a true one, and that his renderingof nineteenth-century
historiographyis a
true one.

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60 EUGENE 0. GOLOB

inside;6 a writing, a speech, a sculpture, building or trip, a conflict, may be

the outside whose meaning we wish to establish. But historical events cannot
be observed like mountains or cows. As they actually transpire they are
part of an infinitely complex welter concerning which a very great many
questions can be asked. Historical inquiry, like all other inquiry, is a matter
of asking questions about evidence, initial questions which frame the inquiry
and subsequent questions which, as they proceed from each other, constitute
the inquiry, and their answers the narrative. Thus the direction and content
of the narrative depends on the kind of framing question that is asked, as
well as, it goes without saying, upon the prior intellectual equipment of the
historian. This is why different historians can write differing histories, and
why reviews of historical works so often reduce to a complaint that an author
has written a different book from that the reviewer himself would have
chosen. This is also why each age will rewrite history to suit its needs, its
questions, asked by minds differing through the very process of history from
those of times preceding.7
Disagreement and perpetual revision, far from being symptoms of malaise,
are in fact of the essence of historical study, and their presence is a sign of
health. White erred by presupposing positivist presuppositions in the his-
torian's field of study, for unless there were significant laws of history there
would be no presumption for agreement. Thus the similarity between narra-
tive fiction and history points not to a proto- or meta-fictional character of
history, but rather to that which differentiates the two.
And that, quite simply, is history's claim to be telling the truth. Not the
whole truth, of course, but nothing but the truth. When a truth-claim is made
for fiction, it is a claim of artistic truth, not historical truth. It is a claim that
a fictional narrative faithfully renders the particular vision of the writer-
artist, not that the events described actually occurred. I am far from ignoring
the philosophical problem that arises here, in the notion that actions which
are not transpiring, as I write, somehow did in fact transpire some time in
the past. But the past is not here. In the words of an eminent contemporary
philosopher of history, "Events don't withdraw from the present as an actor
withdraws from the stage to the wings."8 The past simply isn't. It was this,
of course, that led Croce and Collingwood to see history-as-written as a con-
struction of the historian's mind, differing from historical fiction not in that
it deals with a different subject, a "real" past as against a "fictional" past,

6. For the present context we may bracket all quarrels over the boundary between
what is psychological and what is not.
7. See The Idea of History, esp. V, 2 "The Historical Imagination" and L. 0. Mink,
Mind, History and Dialectic, The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1969), esp. ch. 6.
8. Louis 0. Mink, "On the Writing and Rewriting of History," unpublished paper;
cited with the author's kind permission.

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 THE IRONY OF NIHILISM 61
but because it is inferred from real evidence here present, and is bound to
that evidence. Fiction is not so bound.
I do not think it is necessary, in these pages, to offer a detailed argument
for the capacity of history to achieve truth, "that our evidence obliges us to
say that x happened." The presupposition that people acted with each other
on this planet in times past seems a reasonable one. All historians employ it,
and most poets as well. And the pace of evolution is sufficiently slow that we
can assume that they were on the whole physiologically like ourselves
walked upright, talked, and so forth. Beyond this we do have evidence lying
about, a good deal of it, and it is up to us to see what we can make of it by
sound inference. And we undertake this effort not merely for the fun of it,
sometimes with and at times entirely without interest in policy implications
for the future, but always in the belief that we are saying something true
about the past. The fact that we do not always agree, I have argued following
Collingwood, derives from the nature of historical thinking itself, in its as-
pects of question-and-answer and a priori imagination. We justify what we
say by showing it is inferred from the evidence; we explain by constructing
narratives; and the principle of understanding to which we make implicit
appeal is not Humean causality but what Mink calls "synoptic judgment,"9
the kind of understanding we employ when a sequence has been completed,
and when we grasp the interconnectedness among the elements of a picture.
If we historians are wrong in our belief that we have been telling at least
some of the truth, then so is everyone who feels satisfied or clarified, when
he hears a narrative explanation of something that concerns him, why dinner
was not ready, why John Smith came to this university and became a history
major, why our preferred candidate lost the last election. If we are engaged
in self-deception in our work as historians, so are the psychiatrist and the
counselor. And so is Hayden White. The overwhelming part of his large
book is, as he says, an exercise in intellectual history. And the vigor of his
historical argument leaves no doubt concerning his own conviction that he is
telling the truth, telling wie es eigentlich gewesen, correcting the errors of
other historians, bringing out aspects of the past that others had missed,
suggesting new interpretations and offering a new synthesis: all of which he
believes true!
White's honesty does not permit him to exempt himself from his judgments.
His own writing he sees in the ironic mode, and this he confesses to be his
aesthetic and moral choice, while everyone else is free to make his own. The
question therefore is this: Does the mode of emplotment prevent there being
any truth-value? Or, to the contrary, is the truth indifferent to the mode of
emplotment? White argues the former; I shall argue the latter.

9. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding."

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62 EUGENE 0. GOLOB

Consider the fact that a very large proportion of the cases coming before our
courts are thoroughly historical, in the problems they pose and the questions
they raise. On White's thesis the whole process of the law is at the free
choice of judges and jurors. Whether they found for the plaintiff or the
defendant would rest on the a priori emplotments and tropes the judges and
jurors had happened to adopt. But, as we know, men of contrasting tempera-
ment, tastes, moral outlooks, and even ideologies, regularly reach agreement
on the facts of the case, on what actually happened. And the reason why is
obvious: form constrains content but does not determine or define it. Lan-
guage "contributes to the formation and participates in the constitution of a
fact . . . , this, of course, does not mean that it produces the fact."10 A
hate sonnet is just as much a sonnet as a love sonnet. One wonders if this
must not be at times equally obvious to Hayden White and some of those he
cites in theoretical support. And one is led by this wonder to search out the
steps by which they seek to exorcise the obvious.
One of the principal preparatory steps for White's conclusion is his denial
of apodixis11to any and all theories of history: "Placed before the alternative
visions that history's interpreters offer for our consideration, and without any
apodictically provided theoretical grounds for preferring one over another, we
are driven back to moral and aesthetic reasons for the choice of one vision
over another as the more 'realistic' " (433). In his earliest statement of this
proposition, however, it is made to follow and hang upon the prior assertions
that
1) there can be no "properhistory"which is not at the same time "philosophyof
history";2) the possible modes of historiographyare the same as the possible
modes of speculativephilosophy of history; 3) these modes, in turn, are in reality
formalizationsof poetic insights that analyticallyprecede them and that sanction
the particulartheories used to give historical accounts the aspect of an "explana-
tion." (xi-xii)
But no claim of apodixis can conceivably be made for a proposition based
upon free moral or aesthetic choice, so that the denial of apodixis, while a
tactic necessary to White, is literally without meaning.

10. Friedrich Waismann, How I See Philosophy, ed. R. Harre (New York, 1968),
64, quoted by John S. Nelson, Review Essay on Metahistory, History and Theory 14
(1975), 90. Adrian Kuzminski, "A New Science?" Comparative Studies in Society and
History 18 (1976), 134, quotes Northrop Frye, one of the four pillars of Metahistory:
"it would be silly to use a reductive rhetoric to try to prove that theology, metaphysics,
law, the social sciences, or whichever one or group of these we happen to dislike, are
based on 'nothing but' mere metaphors of myths. Any such proof, if we are right,
would have the same kind of basis itself. [N.B.: White readily concedes this.] Criticisms
of truth or adequacy, then, are mainly criticisms of content, not form."
11. According to the Oxford Universal Dictionary this noun is obsolete, but I find
a noun convenient and this is preferable to the neologism "apodicticity."

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 THE IRONY OF NIHILISM 63
Even if it were not simply a category mistake, it would be without signifi-
cance. Modern philosophy of science has tended increasingly to make the same
denial even for the hard fields such as physics, and such questioning has
actually penetrated into the hitherto sacred precincts of mathematics. And
so we are led to one of the ironies that surrounds White's work. Despite his
Nietzschean desire to liberate the will from the burden of allegedly false his-
torical consciousness, he has clothed himself in the garments of neo-Cartesian
rationalism. The innate ideas of the seventeenth century are replaced with
the machinery of linguistics and rhetoric, and the primacy of language and
its supposed deep structures over thought is clearly asserted.
Fully as much now as then, the static rational systems of Cartesian thought
are hostile to history.12 The reasons stand clear in the contrasts between ra-
tionalistic-formal and historical thought: the former studies structural rela-
tions synchronically, presupposing they are eternal; the latter studies concrete
entities diachronically, presupposing that nothing beneath the sun is eternal.
The former tries to smooth out the roughness of change; the latter makes
change precisely the object of study. And the inevitable consequence of
White's effort to expose the inert gas of rationalism to the flame of history is
to smother the latter into inconsequentiality. After all, if history is merely a
way of letting off moral and aesthetic steam, why bother with all that
research?
It is a fair question to ask what grounds there are for asserting the primacy
of language, and, pursuing the distinction between langue and parole, what
grounds there are for claiming that there are deeper structures of meaning
that generate the changing usage of daily speech. The answer would seem to
be that because we can create systems expressing such structures they must
exist. This is very much the form of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument,
which, as Collingwood shows, proves the real existence, not of "un nomme
Dieu," not of the god of any particular religion, but of the concept of God,
and "that in the special case of metaphysical thinking the distinction between
conceiving something and thinking it to exist is a distinction without a differ-
ence." 13 Now, if White and others make a similar move in respect of "deep
structures of language controlling thought," they have thereby abandoned any
appeal to empirical evidence - inconceivable in any event - and merely
argue that such structures do really exist. But that means that a concept, "deep
structures, etc." exists, controls the language in which it is expressed, which
eo ipse proclaims the very primacy of thought over language which White,
and those with whom he affiliates himself, were striving to deny.

12. See Collingwood's discussion in The Idea of History, 59 ff; Adrian Kuzminski,
"A New Science?", 139-140: "White, the apparent ironist, may be identified as a ra-
tionalist metaphysician in disguise."
13. Essay on Metaphysics, 189; Essay on Philosophical Method, 125.

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64 EUGENE 0. GOLOB

Metahistory rests upon an unsound theoretical structure. It represents that

fleeting moment in our intellectual history when the autonomy of history from
positivistic natural science had almost but not quite yet been established, and
when the very limited acceptance of the claims of positivism had peaked; when
antirational (and antiliberal) trends of thought of the late nineteenth century,
which might have been absorbed and properly digested in more stable times,
received enormous emotional support from the Second World War; when
revolution and antiestablishmentarianism became linked with both Nietz-
schean-existentialist and neo-Marxist notions of anarchistic individualism;
when science and knowledge itself could be seen by some to be in the service
of a stultifying conformity or even a bourgeois tyranny; it was in that fleeting
moment, sometime in the 1960s, that the conception of Metahistory was
formed, and it is that moment which it represents. It is at once Nietzschean14
and positivist, an antihistorical plea for intellectual liberation and, for his-
torians, a call for subservience to structural linguistics. Having proclaimed a
widespread if not universal loss of confidence in, nay, disillusion with history,
for the reason that history has not been able to become a science as defined
by positivism, White brings deliverance from despair through this new science
of structural linguistics which might be the novum organon of the close of
the twentieth century,15and proclaims it as the duty of historians henceforth
to learn how to work with it.
I think it is clear that White did not choose to give serious consideration
to the philosophical highway illuminated by James and Whitehead and Col-
lingwood, and today by Mink,16 Dray, Skinner, and even Lakatos and Popper
in differing degrees and ways. And this failure, coming at a moment when it
was easy to be tempted away from genuine historical thinking to the crisis of
dernier cri, left him, and others such as N. 0. Brown, readily open to the

14. Nelson, Review Essay on Metahistory, 89, is correct in pointing out that White's
affinity with Nietzsche is more transparent in "The Burden of History," History and
Theory 5 (1966), 111-134 than in Metahistory, where, as Nelson remarks, "White often
stops short of spelling out the implications latent in his analysis." But there is no ques-
tion that the 1966 article theoretically prefigures the book. It would be interesting to
inquire whether White's later caution stemmed from a fear of putting his readers off-
which is most unlikely - or from a shift, in which he was by no means alone, from
Nietzschean nihilistic assertivenessto the much more restrained ironic idealism of Croce.
15. This frightening possibility was raised explicitly by Michael Ermarth in his re-
view of Metahistory, American Historical Review 80 (1975), 962-963.
16. White cites the Idea of History and two of Mink's articles, but not his Mind,
History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. But citation and reading
are not the same as grappling. It is curious that White, who makes Collingwood his
target in his peroration, challenges him specifically only in respect of one point of
interpretingCroce (who had been Collingwood's friend). White may well be correct and
Collingwood wrong on this point (381); but White might well have attacked Colling-
wood's apparently careless dismissal of J. G. Droysen (Idea of History, 165-166). It is
ironic that White's skillful and convincing interpretationof Droysen actually fits Colling-
wood's history of historiographymuch better than did his own.

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 THE IRONY OF NIHILISM 65
song of Nietzsche. White was concerned to lift from our shoulders "the
burden of history," a past that, not without reason, could be viewed as dis-
couraging, and a mode of thought which, beset with irony, could provide
only a sinking foundation for our aspirations for the future. Seeing himself
within what he regarded as a descent of history into irony, he set out to free
us from irony's grasp by showing that the irony of history rested ultimately
not on objective fact but subjective will. But the kind of intellectual liberation
he offers, by destroying any criterion of truth, also destroys personal responsi-
bility and ultimately, freedom itself.
I have put this strongly, because I think the implications that can be drawn
from Metahistory are dangerous and destructive. White's solution to the
alleged burden of history is unlimited relativism. Collingwood controlled the
inevitable relativism of historical thinking by binding it firmly to its evidence,
and warning that we were limited to the certainty of "interim reports." Re-
jecting this in the vain striving for apodixis, White and others fall into the pit
of willing to think just as you choose. Along Collingwood's path there is the
hope of doing better, founded on the workable knowledge of what we have
done and so can do; in short, of progress if we will it. Along White's path
there is the destruction of criteria arising from the past, and in the desperation
born of this certainty of ignorance, a gnashing of the will. Ironically, the
ironist who saw so clearly the pit into which Nietzsche had fallen, followed
in his steps.

Wesleyan University

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