What does the word ‘history’ mean today? In what sense do we understand ourselves as being historical? The Greek word historia originally meant ‘inquiry’, an inquiry into the truth of something or some state of affairs. By the time of Aristotle, a certain scepticism of historical knowledge had begun to creep into the metaphysical notion of truth, and by the time of Descartes this scepticism had become entrenched in Western thinking. Through the Renaissance and the advent of humanism, a new understanding of history began to materialise, whereby the modern human being understood itself as distinct from previous epochs and through which a notion of ‘historical progress’ manifested itself. Historical consciousness had been awakened. While the reformation of the German university system at the end of the 18th Century breathed new life into the historical study of the past, the increasingly apparent ‘progress’ of history reached its peak in the 19th Century. Through Hegel, history, governed by universal reason, ensured the inevitable progress of humanity toward a state of absolute freedom.
While the idea of an inevitable historical progress waned somewhat in the 20th Century, owing particularly to two world wars and the disastrous realisation of certain historical conceptions of humanity in the rise of fascism and communism, we are still today, in the 21st Century, reeling from the consequences of 19th Century historical thinking.
This research stream explores the question of history and our own relationship with history—our historicality – in the 21st Century according to the ‘development’ of historical consciousness since Antiquity.
CURRENT PROJECTS