nietzsche and postmodernism in geography: an idealist critique

8/3/2019 Nietzsche and postmodernism in geography: an idealist critique

1/21

PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 6, NO. 1, 2003

ARTICLE

Nietzsche and postmodernism ingeography: an idealist critique

LEONARD GUELKEDepartment of Geography, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Abstract The suitability of a new philosophical paradigm for geography needs to be assessed

in the context of the questions it was designed to address and on the basis of clearly articulated

criteria. Postmodernism, the latest contender for the attention of geographers, is here assessed in

relation to Collingwoodian idealism. As an intellectual movement postmodernism arose in the

unique circumstances of academic life in post Second World War France. In this rigidly

structured academic environment a new generation of French scholars, well schooled in the

philosophies of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and the ideas of Marx and Freud, discovered the

radical nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and drew upon his ethical

and philosophical writings to address contemporary issues of power, knowledge, truth and

modernity. All the central anti-humanist ideas of what was to become postmodernism are to be

found in Nietzsche: a distrust of science and knowledge truth claims, the notion of multiple

interpretations and the subordination of knowledge to power. This situated knowledge, set in the

traditions of Continental thought, is not easily incorporated into the empiricist philosophies that

have hitherto defined the mainstream of Anglo-American science and humanist scholarship

including geography. Geographers need to retain a commitment to the foundational value of

science, recognize human agency in the form of the conscious, thinking individual, and continue

to affirm the empirical nature of human geographical research.

People who selected to study geography did not usually do so to devote their academic

energies to the study of philosophy. Yet philosophical viewpoints and positions have had

a major impact on the practice of geography, and geographers, whether they like it or

not, have had to grapple with philosophical questions. In grappling with these questions

most geographers have done so without the benefit of a solid knowledge of philosophy.

In consequence the broader philosophical context within which issues of importance to

geographers have arisen has often been obscure, and geographers have been obliged to

make decisions about ways of approaching geography in somewhat of a philosophical

vacuum. This situation has not been helped by the fact that geographers dealing with

philosophical questions have usually found it convenient to rely on other geographers for

their philosophical education.1 This education was fine as far as it went, but it seldomwent far enough. The understanding of a philosophical tradition requires that the


2/21

98 L. GUELKE

scholar understand its history or genealogy, and appreciate the questions a particular

philosopher or philosophical school sought to address. This context permits the scholar

to match up his or her philosophical needs as a geographer in a much broader and

comprehensive fashion than is the case when that context is lacking, and lacking it often

is in the hands of geographers bent on promoting a new philosophical approach withuncritical enthusiasm.

The discipline of geography has in the course of this century witnessed a number

of major intellectual shifts in the way its practitioners have approached geographical

topics. These shifts have included such diverse approaches as environmental determin-

ism, empiricism, regionalism, quantitative analysis, Marxism and several varieties of

humanism.2 The most recent philosophical contender for the attention of geographers

is postmodernism which is taken here to include the allied movement of poststructural-

ism. As an approach to geography this new addition is as surprising a development as

any yet witnessed. The inspiration for this latest academic movement has come, as

others before it, from sources outside the discipline itself. Indeed, geography must be

considered a latecomer to postmodernism, the principal themes of which had been set

out by its French innovators in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s.3

The advocacy of postmodernism as a paradigm for geography has elements in

common with the way the Quantitative Revolution was presented to geographers

in the 1960s. In the latter case Ian Burtons persuasive article The Quantitative

Revolution and Theoretical Geography provided a well-argued case in support of

the adoption of quantitative methods in geography.4 In retrospect it can be seen that

this article captured the enthusiasm of the times, without in fact providing a secure

philosophical foundation for the approach being advocated. In the 1980s an increasing

number of publications appeared incorporating postmodern ideas. If any particular

one of these publications captures the spirit of the times, as Burton did for the

quantitative revolution, I would propose the article The Postmodern Challenge:

Reconstructing Human Geography, by Michael Dear.5 In this article Dear announces

the importance of postmodernism for geography with all the persuasiveness and

confidence of Burtons earlier effort on behalf of quantification. He sums up his article

with these words:

The fundamental message in this essay has been the need to reconstruct

human geography by realigning it with the mainstream of [postmodern] social

theory. This revitalization, and perhaps even the survival of the discipline

depends upon our willingness to embark upon a constructive engagement with

this mainstream.6

The basic message is that the movement is here to stay and geographers had better

adopt it if they wish to be part of the contemporary academic scene.

A significant number of geographers have embraced elements of postmodernism,

but the movement lacks the coherence and general enthusiasm characteristic of the

Quantitative Revolution. Geographers have taken ideas from postmodernism in ways

that suit their particular purposes, and as befits a movement critical of foundational

knowledge have not concerned themselves with establishing a unified approach.7

In spiteof the many varieties of postmodern geography they all to some degree incorporate ideas

i t d ith Ni t h d F h t d hil h


3/21

NIETZSCHE AND POSTMODERNISM IN GEOGRAPHY 99

An Idealist Perspective

This assessment and critique of postmodernism is grounded in the philosophy of

Collingwoodian idealism, which shares with postmodernism a concern with representa-

tion and the social construction of reality.8 In both approaches it is emphasized that the

world does not naively present itself to its human inhabitants, but is constructed by

them on the basis of ideas. The postmodernist asserts that the world thus envisaged or

represented is always a copy and that there is no way to compare any particular copy

with an unknowable real world.9 While sharing the view that each representation of

the world is not the real world, some idealists maintain that science has developed

models of the world that are reasonably accurate representations of the real thing,

providing a basis on which other representation can be assessed. In other words, the

idealist believes that we know a good deal about the real world and that we can use

this knowledge to help us in understanding how people have represented (or misrepre-

sented) it in their mental models of it.10

In developing his idealist ideas Collingwood classified human (historical) actions orevents as having an outside and an inside.11 The outside of an event had to do with

bodies and their movements and encompassed any elements of a historical event that

could have been observed and described in such terms. The inside of the event involving

human movement or action incorporated the thought embedded in such movement.

The assumption here is that people think about what they are doing and act on the basis

of thought. These two parts of a human action involve an external component, which

can be described and validated from external sources of evidence open to general

scrutiny by scholars, and an internal one, which involves an inference or interpretation

about what a person was thinking when he or she embarked upon the action in question.

The distinction set out above has important implications for scholarship in bothhistory and other social disciplines. It implies that scholars are able to provide an

objective, evidence-based account of what happened. Such accounts will describe what

happened at a specific place and time drawing on any evidence that might be available.

In searching for facts and evidence the scholar will use both theoretical and empirical

approaches. In the former case a theory might support the existence of an event leading

to a search for the evidence that confirms or invalidates it. In the latter case the existence

of an event will not be in question, but its theoretical significance might become the

topic of debate.

Whatever the actual procedures used in the elaboration of facts about the past the

critical point is that the outsides of events can become facts if sufficient, credible

evidence is assembled in their support. We have in this process a means of creating a

past made up of events that happened and can be shown to have happened in this or

that way at a particular place and time. This material provides a foundation for historical

interpretation and analysis. Facts supported by appropriate evidence become the build-

ing blocks on which interpretation rests, but this does not mean that any particular fact

will be necessarily socially or historically significant. Significance is a function of how

events play out in supporting or changing the way people think about themselves and

each other and the world in which they live. Particular facts, which rest on physical

evidence, can become in turn evidence in support of interpretations of particular social

and historical events and episodes.

The voyage of Christopher Columbus made to the West Indies in 1492 becomes afact of historical significance, because it changed the way many Europeans thought

b t th i ld d d th f th E i i f th A i Thi


4/21

100 L. GUELKE

significance, in turn, gives the voyage itself an interest many later voyages across the

Atlantic do not have. What did Columbus think he was doing? Was his voyage a reckless

gamble or a carefully thought out project? As soon as one is concerned with the

explanation of events involving human decisions and thinking, one is concerned with

getting at their insides. This task is trickier than establishing that something hap-pened, because one has to infer what was in a persons mind. The task, however, is not

psychic-mind reading, but an enquiry that uses available evidence to reconstruct what

a person believed.

The process of working out what might have prompted Columbus to sail West

becomes in part an investigation of his geographical knowledge, which we can seek to

recover from an examination of the intellectual world Columbus inhabited together with

any written comments of his own or about him that might have been made. The task

of interpretation is to make an intelligible connection between what Columbus thought

and what he did supporting this interpretation with as much evidence as can be

mustered. One does not assume the world was naively given to Columbus, but to the

contrary one assumes Columbus represented the world on the basis of what he had read,

heard and thought. One tries to understand his actions by uncovering his beliefs about

the world in which he lived, and connecting these beliefs to what he actually did in the

real world.

In idealism we have a philosophy that emphasizes that people must be understood

on the basis of what they believe and how they understand themselves and represent the

world in which they live. This task is coupled to the parallel one of gathering evidence

as a basis for the interpretations presented. The idea of facts existing as potential

evidence for interpretation means that the scholarly endeavor is built on an independent

foundation. Although one is dealing with the way human beings have represented

themselves and the world, one is at the same time grounding ones work on a body ofmaterial that exists independently of particular scholarly interpretations of such repre-

sentations.

The idealist in acknowledging there are different ways in which the world can be

understood adopts a position that divides the mental world of human life from that of

the natural world of phenomena. Although the idealist is aware that science is itself a

human creation, it is seen as one that has had most success in describing and

understanding the world of nature. The methods of science have also achieved some

success in the study of certain aspects of human society, but there are many areas

involving human cultural and historical life that have not been amenable to explanation

using a scientific approach. Here the scholar who wishes to explain why a person or

people behaved as they did needs, the idealist maintains, to recreate and understand the

thought expressed in such actions. In distinction to the postmodernist the idealist is well

disposed to science, recognizing that its most compelling results have been achieved in

the domain of natural phenomena.12

The vantage point sketched out above provides the foundation of the critique of

postmodernism in this essay, and is developed in more detail in the material that follows.

Nietzsche

In keeping with the contention set out above concerning the importance of understand-

ing the context of a philosophical movement, this paper will seek to provide such acontext for postmodernism. In looking at the origins of postmodernism and linking its

l di thi k b k t th i i di t d I h t k l h


5/21


postmodernism emerged as a philosophical movement and what questions its creators

sought to address.

An important key to postmodernism as an academic movement is its origin in

France. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine this movement would have emerged at all had

it not been for the peculiar situation of French intellectuals in the period after theSecond World War. The social context included a centralized and rigid university

system with few of the democratic outlets generally available in North American

universities. This oppressive academic structure culminated in a mini revolt of students

and professors in 1968, precipitating some long overdue reforms. The intellectual

environment was almost as rigid in the pre-1968 period with a philosophical orthodoxy

constructed around the writings of Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Marx. It was this

academic and intellectual environment that provided the point of departure for the

scholars who were to become the seminal thinkers of the poststructural and postmodern

movement.13 If Hegel et al. provided a point of departure the movement gained its

defining essence from the incorporation of the ideas of the nineteenth century Germanphilosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The works of Nietzsche inspired such scholars as

Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and Cixous to develop distinctive new approaches

to the analysis of social life, and his influence is openly acknowledged by all of them. 14

Anyone seeking to understand the foundations of French poststructuralism and

postmodernism needs in the first instance to study Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a difficult

philosopher. He wrote extensively and left, in addition to his published works, volumin-

ous writings and unfinished notes. Although his writings do not endorse totalitarianism

as such, there was enough there for him to be enthusiastically adopted as a precursor of

German National Socialism. In the context of British and American philosophical

tradition Nietzsche is an eccentric indeed, although he is now the focus of a vigorous

scholarly industry intent on making his philosophical contributions more accessible to

English readers. He is primarily a philosopher of ethics and a literary figure. He was by

training a philologist and his early work focused on re-interpreting ancient Greek

literature and philosophy. When he turned his attention to ethics it was to criticize the

values of his time. Nietzsche is famous for the pronouncement God is dead, and his

view that an Ubermensch (superman) was required to overcome the pathetic herd-like

values associated with the common man. Nietzsche was an extreme misogynist viewing

women as inferior to men in every way, suitable only as recreation for warriors.

Nietzsche wrote about the Ubermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an individual

who would be elevated, indeed would overcome, the ordinary man whose values and

ideas and herd-like morality had guaranteed the mediocre society that passed forWestern civilization. As Nietzsche was an elitist with contempt for inferior people who

made up in his mind practically all of humanity, it is indeed a paradox that his

philosophical ideas have been adopted by an intellectual movement one of whose

achievements has involved drawing attention to historically oppressed peoples such as

women and homosexuals. The standing of Nietzsches political and ethical ideas on

their heads would not pose unduly troubling questions were it possible to detach

Nietzsche the philosopher of power from Nietzsche the ethicist. The very postmod-

ernists who have insisted on the inseparability of politics and knowledge in their own

positions have evidently had no difficulty dissociating themselves from Nietzsches

elitism at the same time they have embraced his philosophy of knowledge.In his History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell categorized Nietzsche as a

lit hil h H t


6/21

102 L. GUELKE

Nietzsche, though a professor, was a literary rather than an academic philoso-

pher. He invented no new technical theories in ontology or epistemology: his

importance is primarily in ethics, and secondarily as an acute historical critic.15

This assessment, which does not find support among modern Nietzschean scholars, is

nevertheless helpful for understanding Nietzsche in the context of Western philosophy.16

Nietzsche himself complements Russells description of him, describing his writings as

those of a psychologist.

That psychologist without equal speaks from my writings, is perhaps the

first insight reached by a good readera reader as I deserve him, who reads me

the way good old philologists read their Horace.17

Nietzsche with his background in classical philology approached philosophy from an

unconventional perspective seeking to establish that questions of knowledge were tied

up with human motivations.

In his works Nietzsche has much to say about literature, art, language, humannature and beliefs.18 He deals with these topics in the form of critical commentaries

frequently destabilizing his readers who are confronted with a world in which conven-

tional values are questioned and often turned upside down.19 Nietzsches purpose in

these writings is to undermine and discredit the foundations of much Western thought

from religion (Christianity), to moral values to the principles of knowledge. As a literary

and ethical critic Nietzsche is on reasonably firm ground, because in this realm of

thought psychological analysis can often provide one with valuable insights into why

people behave as they do. In this realm of literature art and ethical criticism there is,

moreover, no ultimate or foundational reality to which critics can appeal, in support of

their evaluations. All art is interpretation.In developing his ideas on knowledge and truth Nietzsche makes much of the fact

that people experience the world from different perspectives and in different ways.20

This perspectivist point of view asserts:

that one always knows or perceives or thinks about something from a particular

perspectivenot just a spatial viewpoint, of course, but a particular context

of surrounding impressions, influences, and ideas, conceived of through ones

language and social upbringing and, ultimately, determined by virtually every-

thing about oneself, ones psychological make-up, and ones history. There is

no perspective-free global viewpoint, no Gods eye view, only this or that

particular perspective. There is, therefore, no external comparison or corre-spondence to be made between what we believe and truth in itself but only

the comparison, competition or differences in quality within and between the

perspectives themselves.21

This line of reasoning permits Nietzsche to entertain the possibility that we live in a

world capable of supporting an infinite number of interpretations.22 According to

Nietzsche, there are no facts, only interpretations.

Nietzsches perspectival view of knowledge and his literary inclinations made him

suspicious of science and its claims to objectivity and truth, which he dismissed as

prejudices and irrefutable errors.23 This negative view of science and indeed

knowledge in general needs to be assessed in the context of Nietzsches explorations ofthe nature of human beings, in particular their will to power. This will, according to

Ni t h h l ki th t d f h ti it i i


7/21


psychology as much as one of understanding rationality. Nietzsche does what he can to

demolish the idea of truth, putting forward his own famous definition of it.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropo-

morphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and

rhetorically intensified, transferred, and, embellished, and which, after long

usage seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions

which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become

worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their

embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coin. 24

Nietzsche was very much his own philosopher producing an original body of work

that stands in its own right, but his work also presents a view of humanity that connects

him with thinkers such as Marx and Freud. Although all of these individuals presented

quite different ideas on the forces that shaped societies, they all shared the idea that

people were products of forces they did not control and seldom understood. InNietzsche the force that matters is the will to power, and it is this blind will that drives

individuals to act as they do. In this scheme, thought is not the source of human action,

but a pathetic rationalization of acts whose driving power has nothing to do with reason

or intellect. In Nietzsche power takes over from Marxs forces of production that

determine the structure of societies and define their corresponding varieties of human

consciousness and from Freuds unconscious mind that is shaped by sexual forces of

which the individual has little or no understanding.

French Postmodernism

The appeal Nietzsches work had for a new generation of frustrated French intellectuals

already well schooled in continental philosophy and the ideas of Freud and Marx is not

difficult to understand. Nietzsche provided them with a heady mix of destabilizing ideas,

combining a devastating critique of traditional Western values with a frontal attack on

knowledge and its subordination to the dictates of power. If the French scholars, who

found in Nietzsche the means of confronting the conventional wisdom, were not

misogynists they were willing to overlook Nietzsches views on women (notwithstanding

Nietzsches admonition to his readers that they should accept his philosophy in full or

not at all). The essential themes of the poststructuralism and postmodernism are all to

be found in the works of Nietzsche: the deconstruction of Derrida, the power-knowledge

thesis of Foucault and the distrust of reason and science found in both of their writings

and those of practically all thinkers associated with this movement. The Nietzschean

legacy has been built on and modified by his many French interpreters and its principles

have been extended into new domains of empirical analysis.25 Yet notwithstanding the

enormous effort that post-World War Two scholars have put into refining and extending

the ideas of one of Germanys great philosophers, they are still very much in Nietzsches

debt for the fundamental propositions and ideas that underpin their endeavors.

In geography Foucault has been the most important source of Nietzschean ideas,

in spite of the opaqueness of much of his translated work.26 It helps to know that

Foucault held the position of professor of systems of thought, and his concept of episteme

comes close to endorsing the idea that people need to be understood in terms of theirbeliefs and ideas. Indeed, Foucault lives up to the title of his professorship in the way

h l d th i t ll t l h t i ti f th pi t h id tifi d Th i t


8/21

104 L. GUELKE

much to complain about here. Foucaults views, however, quickly acquire Nietzschean

overtones with the notion that systems of thought or discourses are embedded in power

relations. In this power nexus people lose their autonomy as independent subjects and

become inscribed as products of the discourses over which they have little or no control.

In this world of power discourse the individual thinker is subordinated as a responsiblesubject as fully as he/she becomes a product of economic or sexual forces in the works

of Marx and Freud respectively.

Foucault adopted Nietzsches ideas on power as the basis of his approach to

understanding society, but he did not regard himself as an interpreter of Nietzsches

work. He is quite blunt about this.

Nietzsches contemporary presence (as the philosopher of power) is in-

creasingly important. But I am tired of people studying him only to produce

the same kind of commentaries that are written on Hegel or Mallarme. For

myself, I prefer to utilize the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought

such as Nietzsches is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan andprotest. And if commentators then say I am being faithful or unfaithful to

Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest.27

To conclude his remarks Foucault might have quoted (which he did not) the following

sentence from Nietzsche that supports this position: One repays a teacher badly if one

remains only a pupil.

It is important to understand how completely Foucault undermines our common

sense ideas about how societies function. The individual subject is not a free agent

making decisions about what to do on the basis of his or her goals and a deliberate

assessment of the possibilities of achieving them in a given situation, but the uncon-

scious product of the systems of thought that define an individuals identity in a nexusof power relations. On this view people are not responsible self-conscious agents. How

could they be, if the power that really drives them to do what they do is not fully

comprehended if comprehended at all. In Foucault power reaches into the very grain

of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself their actions and attitudes, their

discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.28 The death of the subject is,

therefore, also the death of the accountable person, who is responsible for his or her

actions as a conscious decision maker.

The power relations governing societies have implications that go beyond the

individual. The whole idea of knowledge is something that exists independently of a

particular subject is undermined. Megill has explicated this important dimension of

Foucaults thought:

Foucault views all claims to knowledge as irremediably tied up with the

exercise of power. There is no such thing as an objective knowledge, no

possibility of retreating into the Cartesian poele. Any claims to objective

knowledge, to valid theory, are merely attempts to exercise power of one sort

or another. The corollary of this is that theory has no status as theory; on the

contrary, it is nothing other than practice.29

The reduction of theory to practice is the final blow against the possibility of a science

of society in which theoretical claims have to have empirical status to be acceptable.

The idea that people might be the products of forces over which they have little orno control will not be a novel idea to geographers familiar with the history of their

di i li Th t f i t l d t i i i d th id th t


9/21


the physical geography of a place controlled the nature of its human development and

people became under this theory products of their physical situations. Ironically, the

idea of people as products of forces they do not control re-emerged at the end of the

twentieth century to complete the circle with geography as practiced at its beginning.

The new poststructural and postmodernist view of people to be sure eschews theenvironment as a causal factor and calls upon a very different set of forces, but in both

cases people are not the authors of their own lives with their successes and failures

(however defined) but essentially products of the circumstances (sites of discourse) they

do not control. Like the environmental determinists before them postmodern geogra-

phers sometimes relax their strict principles and acknowledge that individuals are

sometimes able to modify, if not substantially change, the circumstances in which they

find themselves through their own intellectual efforts.

In spite of many differences among the French poststructuralists and postmod-

ernists they share a view of the world that has certain key characteristics. Whether these

characteristics have always been properly translated into English contexts is a moot

point, the fact is there is a constellation of ideas that forms the foundation of a particular

way of looking at the world. The key ideas include the view that people are products of

forces they do not control, that power not reason prevails in the shaping of ideas, that

subjectivity or authorship has little meaning in such a world as does the notion of truth

where knowledge is defined by equations of power. All these ideas are challenges to

idealism and traditional humanism and are considered in this light to be anti-human-

ist.30 This description is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to provide a general

characterization of a movement that has done much to destroy the independent subject

as the maker of his or her own destiny.

It is not unduly surprising that many French intellectuals should have been

susceptible to the ideas of Nietzsche. The academic situation had prepared them for hisideas and it served their scholarly purposes. What is far more difficult to understand is

the widespread appeal of French Nietzschean thought to scholars and academics in the

English-speaking world. The common sense empirical and scientific traditions of

England and the United States have not been ruptured, but many scholars have been

lost to the appeals of Continental thinking.31 I must leave it to sociologists of knowledge

and other specialists to explain this perplexing phenomenon. In this paper I wish to

examine the merits of the poststructural/postmodernist movement itself with a view to

highlighting its shortcomings. This examination will not be entirely negative, because it

will include a proposal for a return to a securer world in which science is affirmed, the

author is resurrected and truth is rediscovered.

Science Affirmed

First, I will examine the anti-scientific posture of postmodernism. Although there are

good reasons to question whether human activity will ever be adequately explained on

the basis of science, there seems to be little point in denying the validity of well-

confirmed scientific knowledge of the natural world. The principles governing, say,

electricity, blood transfusions or moon rocketry are the same whoever one is or wherever

one happens to be. It is self-evident that well-confirmed scientific knowledge of natural

phenomena does not rest for its validity on the peculiarities, culture or social positions

of the scientists responsible for this knowledge. A decision to accept the well-testedtheories and results of science in providing foundational knowledge of the world does

t th t l ith t i h lid k l d th t i i ll


10/21

106 L. GUELKE

applicable in all domains of knowledge. A commitment to science is essentially a

commitment to test knowledge claims in ways that eliminate individual bias and to

ensure that what knowledge is accepted is grounded on objective, verifiable evidence.

If science provides a means to acquire knowledge of phenomena capable of

independent verification, this does not suggest scientists are infallible or that all claimsscientists make are of equal merit. Much so-called scientific knowledge is inadequately

supported with evidence or is at a hypothesis testing stage, but there are also vast areas

where scientific knowledge is well confirmed and secure, providing the foundations on

which reliable predictions and inferences can be made and constituting the basis of

modern technology.32 Science has had less success in providing secure knowledge of

human societies, and in this domain its claims are often contested. Whatever the status

of scientific knowledge might be, its great strength lies in its testing procedures, which

ultimately ensure that inadequate theories can be refuted of restated in ways that align

them with empirical evidence.33

Scientists do not have the freedom to interpret the world as they might see it. Their

constructions or reconstructions of the world must be grounded in evidence from that

world. Unlike the artist, scientists must set out criteria on the basis of which their

hypotheses and theories can be tested against the world they seek to explain. Not only

are such criteria required, but just as important, it is not the authors of new theories or

interpretations who get to decide on their validity, but the scientific community as a

whole whose responsibility it is to evaluate all significant new knowledge claims. These

constraints on the scientific imagination mean that many theories do not achieve the

status of secure knowledge.

Although there are many scholars who question the appropriateness of applying the

methods of natural science to human societies, there is no shortage of social scientists

who have adopted such procedures. These scientists seek to discover laws and theoriesapplying to human activity. The status of such knowledge is dependent, as it is in the

natural sciences, on connecting ones conjectures about society to a body of empirical

evidence. The efforts of social scientists do not come close to replicating the success of

natural scientists in establishing well-confirmed laws and theories, but social scientists in

disciplines such as psychology and economics have produced a body of general knowl-

edge that is reasonably well confirmed by empirical evidence.34

If postmodernism rejects science, it does not reject the idea of theory, but frees it

from the constraints that unite both natural and social scientists in a quest for objective,

verifiable knowledge. The postmodernist endorses the notion that there are multiple

interpretations of events, providing an opening for every scholar to become his or her

interpreter of social theorist.35 There is a vast difference between scientists construing

their task as one of making a contribution to a particular body of knowledge that will

stand independently of their own individual personalities and that of construing it as an

opportunity to inform the world about their own interpretations on the matters they

might care to investigate.36 The latter approach to scholarship apart from demanding

that individual authors possess the kind of mind and literary skills that would make their

musings and reflections of general interest militates against the notion of research and

scholarship as a communal effort. This notion is crucial to the whole idea that

knowledge accumulates on the basis of the combined efforts of many individuals.

The anti-scientific position of postmodernism has an important self-serving conse-

quence for such scholars by making it unnecessary for them to present their social theoryfor empirical verification. Science of whatever description has been concerned with

idi i i l id i t f it th i H th th i d l


11/21


are only as good as the tests to which they have been subjected. If one rejects the whole

idea of empirical verification and testing one creates an environment in which theoretical

work can proceed without limits. The lack of clear criteria on which theoretical

propositions can be tested and, if necessary, rejected makes nonsense of theory in all

disciplines seeking to say something about the world in which we live. Scholars are givencarte blanche to affirm what they want to affirm, to reject what they do not like without

having to do the hard work of providing the evidence on which their selections are made.

The anti-humanist notion that people are largely unaware of who they are or what

motivates them to do what they do might ironically provide an agenda for psychological

science dedicated to producing well-confirmed knowledge of the factors that channel

people in this or that direction. A recent study, for example, made a case for younger

siblings are more likely to rebel than their first born brothers or sisters. 37 This thesis is

exactly the kind of thesis that lends itself to scientific testing if it is to have a status

beyond personal speculation. If birth order can affect ones personality so too can a host

of other factors and they should be investigated by social scientists with appropriate

qualifications. Similarly, the idea that people are products of their particular situations

or can be defined in terms of such attributes as gender, race or class provides a weak

basis for social research if it is not connected to the procedures of science. Ironically the

research agenda of social theory, precisely because it is primarily concerned with forces

that are acting on people at a subconscious or unconscious level, is ideally tailored to the

methods of quantitative research. In the absence of such methods social theory not

surprisingly becomes speculative philosophy in the tradition of Nietzsche, whose works

have been so influential in promoting this line of thought.

The emergence of postmodern social theory with little or no emphasis on proce-

dures of verification (or falsification) has encouraged much ungrounded speculation.38

The value of any theory or interpretation in all academic endeavors that purport to saysomething about real or empirical phenomena lies in the confidence we can have in their

truth or correctness. A theory or interpretation must have sufficient empirical evidence

in its support to provide one with a basis for accepting it: not just evidence that

illustrates the theory, but evidence that seeks to test it. The question any inquiring

scholar needs to ask is: What is the evidence in support of this interpretation that

compels me to accept it? Without such evidential support a theory remains a specu-

lation or conjecture without status as empirical knowledge. Such unsupported theory

might well promote a particular cause and encourage political action or support. But

theory must do better than this, if it is to escape the fate of political ideologytrue for

supporters and few else.

Resurrecting the Author/Subject

The postmodern view of people as unwitting or unconscious victims of forces they do

not control or understand makes the study of human consciousness a secondary issue

to the study of power relations, and the idea of the active subject as the maker of his or

her own life all but disappears. This view is rejected. Instead it is proposed that human

beings are the makers of their own societies as self-conscious agents aware and in control

of what they are doing. In constructing their societies people have done so as physical

and psychological beings and have sought (successfully or not) to create societies in

which these elements are taken into account. The essence of this humanist approach tounderstanding the nature of human life gives priority to the analysis of what people have

d f th l i ltit d f hi t i l i t l d i l it ti


12/21

108 L. GUELKE

The idea that people have the freedom to make themselves (within the constraints of

historical circumstances and their human bodily existence) contrasts with the view that

thought is brought-up, so to speak behind basic instincts or forces that are propelling

individuals in this or that direction

The view set out above has a strong and vital history in the modern era beginningwith the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and continued by major thinkers such as

Herder, Dilthey, Croce and Collingwood.39 All these individuals remain influential

within philosophy and each of them has become the focus of what amounts to an

academic cottage industry. The idea that people have made their own histories as

conscious intellectual beings, that societies are human creations, is here classified as an

idealist approach. If the term idealist is somewhat broad it serves nevertheless as a

general description of a position in which the thinking subject is accorded the major role

in defining and making human society, that people construct the worlds in which they

live giving them meaning in terms of their objectives and particular traditions of thought.

The idealist does not dispute the importance of looking at people in the context of

the power positions they occupy in a given social formation. People, however, are not

seen as inscribed by their historical legacies, but rather are viewed as active, conscious

historical agents who grasp who they are and where they fit in a given social order.

Individuals will organize their lives according to their understanding of what is possible

for them as individuals and members of larger groups. This understanding will vary as

individuals will differ on ways to advance themselves or change society. In this area we

have a contest of competing conscious individuals and groups working within a

historical legacy that provides the ground rules of engagement. In this contest the

strategies adopted by this or that person or group of people can be seen as incorporating

their ideals and goals and understood as an intellectual process.

The resurrection of the dead author of postmodernism as a thinking personcapable of responsible action does not imply that people do not have a biological and

psychological existence. The important issue from a historical and social point of view

is how such phenomena are understood. The scholar is not primarily concerned with

modern ideas about what factors really account for this or that kind of personality or

behavior, but how the peoples of the past understood themselves and attributed (causal)

responsibility for various kinds of action. In the fictional world of Erewhon the sick were

jailed and criminals hospitalized, under a system which reversed the usual causal

connections relating to individual accountability.40 Yet however different this and other

societies might be, they need to be understood in terms of the way their members

constructed reality, because such constructions provide the basis on which people make

judgments about each other and the world around them.

In looking at societies as made up of conscious, thinking individuals, who make

decisions for themselves about the conduct of their lives, one does not imply that people

are driven by rational goals, but maintains that whatever their unconscious goals might

be they must be achieved within the social and cultural contexts of the societies in which

they find themselves. The historical and social focus is not primarily on the nature of

human drives, but rather on how human drives are expressed, or dealt with in particular

social and historical settings. There are specific goals to which people aspire in seeking

to satisfy their unconscious drives or desires and the scholar is in a position to assess and

follow the strategies adopted to reach such goals. There is a world of understanding that

deals with the causes of human action at the level of consciousness. These causes are theconscious motives of people acting or responding to the people and events around them.

I th ti d l k d t f th i it ti


13/21


members of particular groups and societies, and their conduct needs to be understood

in these terms.

The restoration of the independent, conscious subject to a place of pre-eminence in

human geography does not mean that social forces and social movements should be

ignored. The individual is fully capable to understanding that his or her interests mightbe best advanced in an organized way. The workers in a particular industry might form

a trade union to protect and advance their interests, but on the position presented here

they would do so as individuals who understood what they were doing. In whatever

circumstances people find themselves, they have to make decisions about what their

interests and objectives are and how best to secure them. In this process one finds the

drama of great mass movements and the heroism of individual action and the mundane

give and take of everyday life. Whatever the scale, human society is construed as the

product of conscious individual subjects interacting with each other and the world

around them.

The idea that people have made their own societies takes on enormous significance

for history and the social sciences in the hands of Vico and other like-minded philoso-

phers.41 Vico argued that not only had people made their societies, but as a consequence

of this fact scholars could understand what they had done, because scholars were

thinking beings like the people they were studying. In contrast Vico maintained that the

human understanding of nature would always be limited to describing and modeling its

external attributes, because it was (as he put it) Gods creation not ours. Once it is

accepted that people have created their own societies (its culture, institutions and

technologies), individuals become the active agents of historical change, and analysis can

take place at the conscious level of human thought and ideas.

Scholars who approach their tasks within the idealist tradition study past societies

by seeking to understand how the individuals who comprised them thought aboutthemselves and the world around them. In recovering the ways of thinking of past

peoples the historian is in a position to understand why they acted as they did. This

mode of analysis involves seeing the world with the ideas, concepts and theories of the

people under study, connecting theories to their thought in a coherent and logical way.

If there is a probing of anything at the unconscious level it is to uncover the presuppo-

sitions or taken-for-granted assumptions on which conscious thinking rests.42 In this

type of approach the subject is reconstructed as the basis of analysis: the scholar must

interpret what was said and done in the context of what the subject thought and wanted

to achieve.

The Nietzchean thesis on perspectivism which has its modern counterpart in the

idea of situated knowledge is a useful concept if it is seen as a methodological device

apart from its epistemological status. That people will interpret the world differently

depending on their backgrounds, personalities and situations is affirmed by idealist

scholars. The idealist seeks to rethink or reenact the thoughts that people have about

who they are and the strategies they develop to pursue their goals. The variety of

perspectives that might be present in a social or historical situation are seen as

components of the whole, because taken together they provide a basis for understanding

how the people involved in a given event or episode interacted with each other. The

assumption here is that the scholar needs to understand what people are doing in terms

of the various ways in which they have constructed their worlds. These partial perspec-

tives when integrated into an account of the entire event or episode can help to explainwhy what happened happened in the way it did.

Th i t lit t th d il bl t h l d i i t


14/21

110 L. GUELKE

reconstruct the thought of past people. Vico himself talked about imaginative reenact-

ment, Herder used the term einfuhlen.43 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries the German word verstehen was widely adopted by followers of Dilthey and

Weber. In England, R.G. Collingwood used the term re-enactment and rethinking

to describe the scholars task of understanding the mindsets of the people he/she wasstudying.44 More recently these terms have been re-employed by Dray and other

Collingwood scholars seeking to elucidate his philosophy for the modern scholar.45

Whatever name one wishes to use here, there is nothing further from the idealist position

than the idea of rethinking as some kind of psychic mind reading. The emphasis is on

intelligible conscious thought, the kind of thought that is expressed when people

communicate with each other. The scholar who desires to drop in on a historical

conversation needs to know the issues that concerned the people he or she is studying

and understand their language. He/she wants to recover the contemporary mindsets with

a view to the critical analysis of why the various individuals and groups acted as they did.

It is focused on self-conscious individual subjects and groups, whose utterances,

statements and writings are analyzed as expressions of thought usually designed with an

audience in mind and not to be taken at face value.

In recognizing human communication is usually directed at an audience scholars

should be aware that people can be devious and dishonest in their dealings with each

other, revealing very little of the thought that underpins their observed activities.

Nietzsche understood this element of human nature better than most when he wrote:

This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying,

deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed

splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others

and for oneselfin short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of

vanityis so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost

nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for

truth could have arisen among them.46

The possible deviousness of human actions, however, provides no grounds for abandon-

ing the idea that people think about what they want and adopt rational strategies

dependent on context to achieve them.

Rediscovering Truth

The psychological Nietzsche was convinced that human concern with truth was asunlikely a development as any, given the preoccupation people had with power and their

own survival, and he was skeptical about the whole idea. A number of scholars have

interpreted his writings as undermining the very idea of truth. Clark has described the

views of some of them.

Many assume that Nietzsche has demonstrated that there are no facts and no

truths, but only interpretations, or different perspectives on reality. It is

therefore apparently a mistake to attempt to give the correct interpretation of

anything, including, if not especially, of Nietzsches own philosophy. His

writings can only be supposed to offer a model of what lies on the other side

of philosophythe liberated intellect playing joyfully with itself, rather thanengaged in the ascetic activity of offering arguments and theories, or even

tt ti t thi t 47


15/21


The above position might have some philosophical merit, but it provides no help for the

empirical scholar. The possibility of creating a body of empirical knowledge depends on

there being objective ways of connecting theories, ideas and interpretations to a tangible

or real world.

However unlikely a development it might have been, the idea of truth did gain holdand with the emergence of empirical procedures it became possible for contending

theories and ideas to be tested against facts. In open societies the acceptance of a specific

theory or interpretation is in the long run dependent on its empirical success, making the

social position of the individual who might have proposed it irrelevant. This ideal can

and has been corrupted, but spurious claims in science and outright propaganda have

a tendency to expose themselves. The role of facts and evidence in science can be

thought of as performing a role that is similar to that of the market in capitalist

economies, namely that of an impartial arbiter whose authority is able to overwhelm any

individual or group claim. (Whatever happened to cold fusion?) It is convenient to

describe well-confirmed knowledge as the truth, and there does not seem to be much

point in abandoning a word or concept whose meaning poses no difficulty for general

understanding, however contested its meaning might be among professional philoso-

phers.

The Nietzschean-inspired view that science is one among many possible interpreta-

tions of the world of human experience has merit in its recognition that scientific reality

is a human construction. In the same way a map is not the territory it depicts, science

is not the reality it describes. It is useful to keep such distinctions in mind particularly

when ones model of reality does not appear to fit with experience. Yet in many cases

models have been so well tested that it makes good sense to elide this distinction. The

model in such cases becomes for all intents and purposes reality. Would it be going

too far to claim the world is round is a true fact not an interpretation? I do not thinkso. The well-confirmed facts of science might still be models, but to call such facts

real would not privilege science, but rather would privilege what is self evident to any

reasonable person. There might be a reality that is beyond the one just described but it

is a reality that can safely be left to metaphysical philosophers and theologians to define.

The idea that there are well-confirmed facts that cannot be denied by any

reasonable person is at odds with the view that knowledge is a product of power. In

ancient Britain King Canute, in a demonstration of the limits of royal power for the

sycophants around him, ordered the advancing tide back, but he was not obeyed.48

Human beings can harness the power of nature with accurate knowledge of how nature

works, but they cannot change natures laws on the basis of social power. If the view that

knowledge is a function of power is clearly nonsensical in the realm of natural science

the same principle must also apply to other realms of empirical knowledge. The very

idea of knowledge grounded on empirical observations and evidence creates a principle

of knowledge acceptance and rejection that rules out power as a relevant factor in the

discovery of new knowledge.49

The notion that interpretations must be grounded on evidence is a principle that

applies to all disciplines dealing with the real or nonfictional world. A common principle

or goal, however, does not imply that only one method or approach is consistent with

it. In the natural and social sciences, theories and laws provide the principal tools of

explanation, and their value is dependent on their ability to make accurate predictions

of the systems to which they apply. In the realm of human activity there is much thatcan be learned from science, but also much that is beyond its reach. If it is assumed that

l thi ki t ith th it f ki f d i i d h i th


16/21

112 L. GUELKE

methods of natural science have to give way to procedures aimed at recovering the

thought that is incorporated in the activity one is concerned to understand. In history

and some social sciences the task of explanation is often better construed as one of

understanding the thinking and mindsets of the people whose actions one is investigat-

ing. This focus in no way dispenses with the requirement that scholars support theirinterpretations with evidence. Collingwood has identified three rules of method to which

the historian, but not the artist or novelist is bound.50 First, the historian must localize

his or her interpretation of an event in space and time. Second, there is only one

historical world and all historical accounts must stand in relationship to it and each

other. Third, the historian must provide the evidence on the basis of which the truth of

his or her historical statements can be justified and defended. This task requires the

imagination of the scholar as much as any natural scientific endeavor, but the historian

is no freer than the scientist to imagine connections, in this case between what people

thought and did, that are not supported by appropriate empirical evidence.

The requirement that interpretations be supported by evidence seeks to provide a

criterion separating fact from fiction. The objective of scholars concerned about people

as social and geographical agents is to describe and interpret what they did. It is

assumed that it is possible to focus on significant factors in any human enterprise or

activity, those factors that were consciously taken into account by the social agents

whose actions helped shape the outcome of a particular social or historical process. In

the way that one can describe a chemical reaction in terms of the chemical agents

involved in it without including all the particularities of the laboratory in which it

occurred in a similar way one can identify significant factors in a human situation,

without in any way coming close to reproducing the past as it actually happened. A

scholarly or scientific community in agreeing on criteria of relevance creates a situation

in which the limits of knowledge are defined in ways that transcend the individuals ownparticular and unique perspective on any phenomenon or event of general interest.

The historical utterance, text or action is not open to re-interpretation by the

scholar. What was said, written or done must be assessed in terms of what the

individuals who spoke, wrote or acted intended by their deeds whether or not they were

successful in achieving them. The historical scholar who interprets the American

Declaration of Independence must do so in terms of what its signers thought they were

doing and why they produced it in the way they did. One could in a separate study look

at the impact of the Declaration in terms of what it meant to later generations, but this

would be a different study. The scholar concerned with the Declaration of Indepen-

dence as it was written in 1776 has no liberty to interpret it except as an expression of

the ideas and objectives of these responsible for it. On this principle there is a correct

interpretation of this document: the interpretation that reveals the actual intentions and

thinking of the individuals who produced and signed the document. Such an interpret-

ation might elude historians, but in acknowledging it exists as a possibility one provides

a goal for serious scholarly engagement.

The idealist assumes that the objective of scholarship is to provide a truthful

account of the episodes and human activities being studied, not in the sense of

replicating what happened but in the sense of identifying the significant facts and factors

that provide an explanation of the topic selected for study. Truth or the concept of truth

provides the regulating idea of humanist scholarship, making it obligatory for scholars

to defend their theories and interpretations with evidence open to public scrutiny. Theconcept of truth as a regulating goal aims at ensuring productive scholarly debate, in

hi h bi j di d l t d i t t ti thl l d


17/21


The truth as some absolute ideal might never be achievable, but a quest for it can

certainly provide a basis for more responsible and accountable scholarship, that steers

clear of irrefutable speculation and interpretations unsupported with empirical evidence.

In the words of the historian G.R. Elton it is the duty of historians to understand

the people of the past, not to invent an alternative existence for them.51

The concept of knowledge set out above is an ideal that is more easily achieved in

the natural sciences than it is in the social sciences and history. In this respect the

Nietzschean idea of perspectivism, in which individual interpretation takes precedence

over facts, is not entirely without merit, but it can be restated more positively. The

individual scholar might indeed make every effort to ensure that his or her account of

an event or phenomenon took account of all relevant particulars and accorded with the

available evidence, but no one is capable of escaping their own social position in a

contemporary society. This situatedness has important implications for history and the

social sciences where human interests and values are frequently involved in the scholars

quest for understanding. Croce acknowledged this problem of history with his famous

statement to the effect that all history is contemporary history.

The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all

history the character of contemporary history because, however remote in time events

there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present

situations wherein those events vibrate.52The scholars positionality, however, does not

give him or her leave to abandon a commitment to interpreting human activities on the

basis of evidence or facts, but it is recognized that the knowledge, interests and values

of each generation of scholars will find expression in the kinds of studies that it is

possible for them to produce.

Conclusion

In areas where there is no requirement that images and ideas have to connect to

anything except themselves postmodernism has much to offer. These areas would

include such subjects as art, theatre, literature and other cultural activities. In all

subjects where what is studied has an existence of its own in the world there is a need

for a philosophy or epistemology that provides a grounding for the knowledge that is

proposed, a philosophy that establishes criteria on which genuine knowledge can be

differentiated from error and nonsense. The disciplines of engineering and medicine

would be of little value if their interpretations of how things worked had no connection

to a reality that actually worked as theorized. The same requirement holds for all

disciplines that seek to understand or explain phenomena that exist or every existed as

real entities. Thus geography, sociology, history, economics and other social sciences are

all concerned with a real world and this concern means that there must be some way

of connecting theories or interpretations of this world to the world itself, in deciding

which of these constructs should be given the status of knowledge.

Geography does not need postmodernism to accomplish its academic mission. The

movement emerged among French scholars as a means for them to address their

particular problems, which were clearly situated within the nexus of French academic

life. Ironically they addressed these problems by taking up the extreme, anti-humanist

philosophy of Nietzsche who was primarily a literary philosopher and trenchant social

critic with a peculiar nihilistic interest in epistemology. The French Nietzscheanphilosophers have little of importance to say to geographers, whose principal concern

ith hil h h t d ith fi di i t l th t t th i i i l


18/21

114 L. GUELKE

work.53 Few geographers would want geography to return to the scientism of the

quantitative revolution era, but most geographers do have a concern with producing

valid knowledge as a means of understanding how people have used and arranged

themselves on the face of the earth, and even providing recommendations and sugges-

tions for how specific groups might improve on their past records. Geographers needphilosophy as a foundation on which to build a body of secure geographical knowledge.

An idealist approach dedicated to understanding people as conscious agents of their

own activities and creations, and insistent on the central role of evidence is well-suited

to geographical scholarship. Geography is the study of what people have made of

themselves as creatures whose existence is inseparable from the earth they inhabit and

on whose resources they depend for a living. How and why have people arranged

themselves in physical spaces and used the resources of the earth in the ways they have?

would be the kinds of questions a geographer might seek to answer within this tradition

of scholarship. When one looks at the way people have occupied and used the earth one

is looking at what people have done as conscious, thinking creatures. In everything that

people have done to, with and on the earth as self conscious, social and purposeful

beings there are embedded human thoughts and ideas that the geographer can seek to

unravel and understand in a systematic and accountable way.

Notes

1. D. Harvey, Explanation in Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); C. Harris, Power, Modernity,

and Historical Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81 (1991), 67183; D.

Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).

2. R. J. Johnston, Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 5th ed. (London:

Edward Arnold, 1997); D. N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested

Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

3. J. Lechte , Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity (London: Routledge,

1994).

4. I. Burton, The Quantitative Revolution and Theoretical Geography, The Canadian Geographer, 7

(1963): 15162.

5. M. Dear, The Postmodern Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography, Transactions, Institute of

British Geographers, NS 13 (1988): 26274.

6. M. Dear, Postmodern Challenge, 271.

7. The extent to which geographers have explored postmodern methodologies has varied widely ranging

from adopting certain of its terms to embracing its key elements concerned with power, knowledge and

modernity. A sense of the different ways in which postmodern ideas have impacted some parts of

geography can be found in the following articles: G. Wynn, A Fine Balance: Geography at theMillennium, The Canadian Geographer, 43, no. 4 (1999): 22043; T. Barnes, Retheorizing Economic

Geography: From the Quantitative Revolution to the Cultural Turn, Annals, Association of American

Geographers, 91, no. 3 (2001): 54665; R. Heyman, Pedagogy and the Cultural Turn in Geography,

Environment and Planning D, 19, no. 1 (2001); and C. Harris, Postmodern Patriotism: Canadian

Reflections, The Canadian Geographer, 45, no. 1 (2001): 193207.

8. The term idealism has been frequently used to describe Collingwoods view of history articulated in his

Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). Whether this term is appropriately used in a strict

philosophical sense is doubtful, because Collingwood does not reject the idea that science can provide us

with useful and reliable information about the natural world. Collingwood becomes a more conventional

idealist when it comes to understanding human actions. Such actions are seen as incorporating human

thought that exists independently of the natural world within which they are embedded. The term

idealism to describe Collingwoods philosophy has been widely adopted by geographers following its use

by L. Guelke in An Idealist Alternative in Human Geography, Annals, Association of American

Geographers, 66, no. 2 (1974): 193202. See also Idealism, in The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd

d d R J J h D G d D M S i h (O f d B il Bl k ll 1994) 270 71


19/21


9. P. M. Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1991), 96.

10. The idealist, however he or she might use the results of science to support a particular knowledge claim

considers that the nomothetic approach of science is not appropriate for an understanding of cultural and

historical aspects of human societies dependent on human thought and creativity.

11. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 213.12. As an idealist I remain skeptical of the application of natural scientific methods to the study of human

societies, but would acknowledge that the massive efforts of social scientists in disciplines such as

psychology and economics have produced some reasonably secure knowledge.

13. L. Ferry and A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990

[1985]).

14. A. D. Schrift, Nietzsches French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (London: Routledge, 1995).

15. B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 760.

16. R. Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), ixx.

17. R. C. Solomon, Nietzsche ad hominem: Perspectivism, Personality and ressentiment, in The Cambridge

Companion to Nietzsche, eds. B. Magnus and K. M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996), 180.

18. R. Schacht, Nietzsche: Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

19. W. Kaufman, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1974); Schacht, Nietzsche.

20. M. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

21. Solomon, Nietzsche ad hominem, 195.

22. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (New York: Vintage

Books, 1974 [1882]), 336.

23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 334335.

24. Schacht, Nietzsche: Selections, 49.

25. C. Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Con (Albany: State University of New York,

1990).

26. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (New York: Vintage

Books, 1965 [1961]); M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York:

Vintage Books, 1971 [1966]); M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972[1969]); M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 19721977 (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1980).

27. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 5354.

28. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98.

29. A. Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1985), 195.

30. A. Renaut, The Era of the Individual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1989]).

31. A. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 194240.

32. Science can, in fact, provide foundational knowledge on which humanistic interpretations of society might

rest. The use of carbon 14 as a means of dating settlement sites or the scientific analysis of historical

documents illustrate how science can help provide a secure basis for an interpretation that might itself not

incorporate a scientific philosophy.33. Feminist scholars have pointed out the male biases that affected many areas of social science making

women invisible or undervaluing their contributions to social and economic life. They have made the

important case that male scientists to the extent that they imposed their gendered thinking on their

subjects were not in the least bit objective. These correctives to the way the world was interpreted far from

undermining the objectives of social science contributed to them by helping ensure a more balanced and

truer account of how societies functioned.

34. There are also disciplines such as history and political science where the methods of the natural sciences

have been less successful. Here analyses that are more idiographic and less theoretical have had greater

success, but most scholars who are skeptical about the formulation of general theory remain concerned

about supporting their specific (idiographic) interpretations with empirical evidence.

35. Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences, 7791.

36. It should go without saying that in an age of where science needs money to forward its mission that

sciences agenda becomes a political agenda. The decision about who gets what money is not science, but

politics or social power. It is about the social priorities of a people or nation. Science is about discovering

h hi k Th h f i i i l b d d i h f di b


20/21

116 L. GUELKE

funding alone cannot generate scientific discoveries. Scientific discoveries exist in the realm of science and

scientific confirmation. This realm might be supported by public funds, but it is a realm of its own in

which discoveries exist in their own right and independently of the forces that might have helped produce

them.

37. F. J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1996).38. F. R. Ankersmit, Historiography and Postmodernism, History and Theory, 26 (1989), 13753; K.

Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past (New

York: The Free Press, 1997).

39. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca: Cornell, 1968); I. Berlin,

Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976); M. Ermath, Wilhelm Dilthey: A Critique of Historical Reason

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); B. Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (New York:

Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921) and B. Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (New York: Norton,

1941); Collingwood, Idea of History.

40. S. Butler, Erewhon or Over the Range (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981 [1872]).

41. L. Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

42. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940).

43. Berlin, Vico and Herder, 173.

44. Collingwood, Idea of History, 21718.

45. W. H. Dray, History as Re-enactment: R.G. Collingwoods Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

and L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Bloomington: University

of Indiana Press, 1969).

46. Schacht, Nietzsche: Selections, 46.

47. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 2.

48. This episode is not, of course, decisive in proving power does not play a role in the production of

knowledge, but it does suggest that there are limits to what power can achieve.

49. This rules out power in the long run. In any given society it might be possible for those in power to

promulgate unproven or false ideas, but it is not within their power to confirm such ideas with appropriate

scientific evidence if such evidence does not exist.

50. Collingwood, Idea of History, 245.

51. G. R. Elton, History According to Saint Joan, American Scholar, 54 (1985): 55155.52. Croce, Story of Liberty, 19.

53. The English-speaking reader of translated works and commentaries on French thinkers would likely have

drawn the conclusion that all modern French academics were poststructuralists or postmodernists. This

conclusion is not warranted. There is, in fact, a lively resistance movement to postmodernism in France,

and the works of this movement are now becoming available in English translation. An important early

anti-postmodernist work was Luc Ferry and Alain Renauts French Philosophy of the Sixties (1990). These

well-read philosophers provide a carefully-argued critique of leading French thinkers such as Foucault,

Derrida, Deleuze and other postmodernists. This work has been followed by others among which are

Renaults The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity (1997) and a multi-authored

work edited by Ferry and Renaut with the provocative title Why We are Not Nietzcheans (1997). The new

anti-postmodern authors are intent on breaking away from the Nietzschean foundations of postmod-

ernism, which they see as having a debilitating hold on scholars who would understand the nature of

human societies.

Note on contributor

Leonard Guelke is an historical geographer with a long-standing interest in philosophical issues in geography.

He has published many articles dealing with such matters and is the author of Historical Understanding in

Geography: An Idealist Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).


21/21

nietzsche and postmodernism in geography: an idealist critique

Documents