Post-Historicism and the End of the Historicist Project: On the Issue of Overcoming Historical Relativism in Analytical Philosophy

Abstract

The article is devoted to consideration of theories of Post-Historicism in the analytical philosophy of history. It is emphasized that Post-Historicism initially performs a critical position to the linguistically oriented historical relativism. Theorists of Post-Historicism criticized discursive understanding of the subject of history, as well as the view of historian as author. They provide paradigmatic turn from the language of historians to the analysis of historical experience (understood as a special, ‘sublime’ experience). It is noted that in the center of the theories of Post-Historicism there are such categories as ‘narrative’, ‘past’, ‘memory’, ‘metaphor’, ‘representation’, etc. The narrativists approach involves the assumption that the historian does not work with events of the past, but only with the interpretations of it. Main historical method is the reconstruction of historical experience through productive reminiscence. There is a fundamentally new challenge: the creation of many local histories in the form of narratives, but without attempts to create ‘meta-narratives’. Retrospectivism in narrative approach is the desire of the historian to retell certain events of the past in the form of textual integrity. The integrity of the narrative as a historical text is based not according to linguistic but to the ‘aesthetic’ principle: it is rooted in describing some historical events in their unity as an experience of certain actors of those events, and considering historian as their interpreter. In the era of Post-Historicism, analytical philosophy of history seeks to design not discourse, but narrative, because the latter one initially appeals to empathize, not understand or build some linguistic kinship. The concept of metaphors is proposed, involving the symbolic interpretation of historical concepts and generalizations, according to which there is a possibility to establish ‘how’ was the past. From the author’s point of view, it is possible to base historical epistemology on the assumption of a symbolic interpretation of historical experience and narrative.