Ankersmit's Historical Performance Theory Research

Frank Ankersmit is a famous contemporary historical philosopher,whose "theory of historical representation" is one of his important academic contributions.This theory contributes to solve the problem that what is the nature of the historical text and its relationship with its own history,as a result,it includes two dimensions: firstly,on the instructions about the nature of the historical text,the whole meaning of a historical comes from the narrative substance which is formulated by all statement sentences it cntains,rather than a reflection of history itself,so the historical text has a kind of independence,as its core narrative substance guarantee the independence.To understand a historical text is to understand what narrative substance is proposed by the text,and such narrative substance is the structure of the historical text itself.Drawing on leibniz's definition of monad,Ankersmit believes that narrative substance have three characteristics in their pure forms: simplicity,closure and universal difference.The overall meaning of the historical text is formed through the narrative substance rather than the history itself.How does the narrative substance construct the overall meaning of the narrative? Ankersmit believes that narrative substance achieves this function through its metaphorical nature--the narrative substance is a metaphor,or a proposal for a way of looking at the world.Starting from a specific proposal,the statements contained in the text are combined in a specific way,and thus the text has a specific overall meaning.Therefore,Ankersmit also discusses the realization and essence of the function of historical text interpretation.Explanation is presented to explain the purpose of the object according to the inevitability of,and as long as we choose a kind of metaphor and proposed by looking at the Angle of history,can see the phenomenon of congenital have necessity,of course,this necessity is limited to within a specific text,rather than an objective inevitability,so it does not help us predict the future.Secondly,in terms of the explanation of the relationship between historical text and history itself,historical text is a "representation" of history itself by historians.Such "representation" is not description or interpretation,it is not cognition but precedes it.On the previous dimension,through introducing the concept of narrative substance,the nature of the text itself had been illustrated,as we can see in this series of notes,the relationship between text and history itself had been suspended,and the reflection of the original which uesed been seen as the virtule relation between text and history itself was rejected now,the relationship between two relations are not within the narrative substance concept which was demonstrated,while the narrative substance through metaphor and proposed the way to look at the world,can be linked with history itself,but this kind of contact had been questioned because of its heavy subjectivity.Therefore,he introduced the concept of representation in the field of art theory to further illustrate the relationship between the two.The meaning of representation is defined according to its relationship from description,interpretation and cognition,that is,representation is a necessary supplement to description,without which there would be no text;Representation is the premise of interpretation and cognition,we can only undertake interpretation or cognition in the premise of specific representation.In addition,Ankersmit put forward a kind of aesthetic view of truth which is different from the traditional view of truth,that is,the specific representation presented a kind of appearance of the world itself,the truthfulness of a specific representation lies in the extent to which it reveal more than the other one in terms of the appearance of world itself.Finally,representation is not an imitation of history by making itself similar to history itself,but an autonomous replacement.The two dimensions of the theory of historical representation are not a kind of parallel relationship,because on the one hand,the latter actually contains the former.On the other hand,from the second dimension to the first dimension,we can get a new understanding,that is,the narrative substance is the carrier of the historical text displaying its representative function.