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DondeyneAlbert: Historicity
DondeyneAlbert: Historicity
Note that the word history has two meanings: the historical events and
the historical descriptions and study of these events. The term "historicity"
refers first of all to the historical event.
HISTORICITY
Albert Dondeyne
Dondeyne: Historicity - 2
Dondeyne: Historicity - 3
10) We must seek to define the nature of historicity, ask the question. What
exactly is historicity? It is actually the task of philosophy to discover
the nature of things and express it in a clear definition. But where does
the philosopher obtain his knowledge? Like anybody else, he gets it
from the daily experience that is common to all and which for this
reason is called pre-philosophical experience.
11) Historicity is a structure that belongs to every human being as part of his
essence. In other words, that man is and knows himself to be a
historical being, is contained in the way man experiences, pursues and
accomplishes his being-man every day. In some sense, therefore, no one,
not even a philosopher, can teach you what historicity is, just as no one
can teach you what it is to be man. You know this from your experience
of being-man, although you may perhaps not be able to give
immediately a clear and precise answer to the questions. What is it to be
man? and, What is historicity? But there are many things which we
know without being able to formulate and define them clearly.
Moreover, if a definition of sadness, of joy, of love means something for
us, it is because we, as it were spontaneously, realize that the given
definition agrees with what experience has already taught us. In this
sense Socrates, the great Greek philosopher, said that man's learning
process is in many cases a sort of remembering; man becomes more
clearly conscious of what he already knew implicitly. Expressed in
modern terms, when we reflect upon our being-man and the meaning of
being-man, when, for example, we want to bring to light its historicity-which precisely is the task of philosophical thought--all we do is clarify
and make more precise a kind of pre-philosophical understanding which
is contained in the daily experience itself of our being-man. What we are
going to do now is to follow this procedure.
We will start with our
pre-philosophical experience of historicity, an experience which we
have had thousands of times.
12) We have perhaps first experienced what historicity is when, many years
ago, we learned from our parents how to call things by their proper
names: What is this? a spoon; and that? a fork; and that? a chair.
13) What happened when we learned these names? We were taken into the
home-world of father and mother (a world that was there long before we
were around); in other words we were established, made present in that
world, so that from then on we would conduct ourselves in its regard as
becomes those who have to live together, to understand one another,
"meet one another" through the many things which we experience as
being "the same." When mother now asks me for a spoon, I will no
longer coe back with a fork, and when father wants a chair, I will not
bring him a broom. It is as if a secret agreement had been made between
2) Man is never alone in the world but always experiences and unfolds his
being-man as a being-together with others. Modern philosophy
expresses this characteristic by the term intersubjectivity.
3) Man lives in time.
These three properties of our being-man constitute the three
components of historicity; but they are so intimately connected, that
whenever one is mentioned, the two others are also implied. Let us
consider this more closely.
20) Man, as Embodied Spirit. As we have explained fully in the third
chapter, man is not a pure spirit, nor a lifeless body, but an embodied
spirit, a besouled bodily being. Materiality is not an obstacle to the
unfolding of his life or the spirit but rather is the way by which the
spirit expresses itself, in the threefold sense that is always attached to
that term. This threefold meaning is: 1) it exteriorizes itself, comes out
of itself; 2) it shows itself to others, comes in the open; 3) it realizes,
completes itself (in scholastic terms, "it passes from potency to act").
To be man is to become man, or
24) But to be together with" also is giving and speaking. Man is likewise
directed to others in his conduct and creativity. What he does, he does
in the name of others, for others, in the sight of others, as if to say,
"what I think, say or do, is good and has value; therefore, act as I do."
He who lives in accordance with God's commandments, bears witness
to those commandments in the sight of others, it is as if he were acting
in the name of all men. "By choosing himself," Sartre justly remarks,
"man
4
chooses all men." That is why human life has the significance of a
testimony, a "profession," i.e., a public declaration.
25) Since man expresses and manifests himself only in his "work," realizes
his being and his being-together-with in his "work," this "work" is the
meeting place of mankind. It is the place where the dialogue with the
past is freely continued with an eye on the future; it is the place where
facticity and idea meet in a dialectical tension, without ever fusing into a
lifeless unity; it is the place where tradition is taken over and reappears
on the scene after being re-created. In short, it is man's "work" that
makes history possible.
In this sense Merleau-Ponty speaks
truthfully about
5
"work as the foundation of history."
26) Man Lives in Time. The meeting of man with others through "work"
takes place in the course of time. What time actually is, is one of the
crucial questions of philosophy, and it is not our intention to delve into
that question here. The following will suffice.
27) Our experience of time undoubtedly contains a certain awareness of
transitoriness, of a succession of temporal moments, a continuous flux.
This is why we are always inclined to represent time as an endless series
of loose, successive moments that can be divided into three sections: the
innumerable events of the past, the endless series of events that will
constitute the future and, the in between, the fleeting now of today,
which, as soon as it has presented itself, immediately disappears into the
past and
makes room for a new now. Strictly speaking, this is a wrong picture of
time; it is the result of a projection of time in space, which by no means
corresponds to our original lived experience of time. "Lived time" is
quite different. It is primarily an experience of presence. What we call
the past, is something that once was present and which we, from the
standpoint of our present now, recognize, preserve, and retain as past.
What we call the "future" is something that we, again from the
standpoint of the present now, expect as a possibility that some day can
or will become a present reality. Hence the experience of an open
presence lies at the foundation of the ideas of past and future. The
experience of presence takes precedence over the past and the future,
because it encompasses, as it were, the other two; but this presence is
not the fleeting now with its total lack of extension.
28) Time, according to Husserl is, in reality, presence (Gegenwart), more
correctly the "life-stream of presence." (lebendig stromende Gegenwart). It
is a kind of presence--we may say, the only mode of presence we human
beings know--the endless presence which is always a tension between
absence and presence, in the sense that the negativity of the absence
contributes to the positivity of the presence. In other words, the
experience of existence that makes us human, that enables us to
experience ourselves, to maintain and realize ourselves together with
others in a real world of real things, is an experience and an exercise of
a presence which exhibits a temporal structure; it contains a reference to
the past and to the future, and, therefore, also to the others in the past
and the future.
29) In fact, what do we call "real"? How does reality appear to our
consciousness? In contrast with the unreal phantasies of dreams and socalled "contents of mental consciousness," we call real whatever we
meet in an experience of presence 1) as being already there (which
points to the past); 2) as an object of possible projects for me or others
(which points to the future); 3) as a meeting place for a possible
encounter with others in a common situation and a common task.
30) A thing that belongs exclusively to my world, that cannot be recognized
by anyone else, or, what comes down to the same thing, that