terça-feira, 11 de agosto de 2015

Charles Guignon on Heidegger’s conception of history


“What is most striking about Heidegger's vision of the "history of being" in the thirties is the soteriological and apocalyptic "metanarrative" that seems to underlie it. History is seen as a monolithic "happening" that, springing from primordial origins, passes through a "dark night of the soul" of forgetfulness, yet embodies the prospects for a redemption in the final recovery of its concealed origins. Just as "futurity" is basic to human temporality, so the future is definitive of history. As Heidegger says, "History as a happening is an acting and being acted upon which, passing through the present, is determined from out of the future and takes over the past" (1M 44, my emphasis).

This conception of history was already articulated in Being and Time. There Heidegger claimed that historiography must begin by projecting "monumental" possibilities for the future to serve as a basis for formulating our sense of where history is headed as a totality. This futural moment is unavoidable, for it is only in terms of some anticipated vision of the end state of historical development that we have a basis for selecting the events that can be taken as historically relevant in formulating our account of what history is adding up to. That is, we can narrativize the confusing array of events of the past in order to find some significance in them only on the basis of some conception of the future outcome of history. The projected sense of the possible achievement of history lets us see what should be "reverently preserved" from the past as the historical record of our culture's achievements (BT 447-8). This is why Dasein must "choose its hero" if it is to identify what is worthy of being retrieved from the past (BT 437) …”

GUIGNON, Charles B.. Introduction. In: _____ (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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