Historizing Humanity-Some Theoretical Considerations on Contextualization and Understanding Regarding the Idea of Humanity

Abstract

Contextualising and understanding is not a new issue in the humanities. On the contrary: they belong to the basic assumptions of their specific early modern way of dealing with the human world in academic discourses. They originated in the fundamental change in historical sense generation from the exemplary to the genetic mode at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. They became essential for the academic disciplines of the humanities with their rational approach to the human world. This can easily be made possible by referring to the pregiven dominating way of doing history in pre-modern times. Here it was the exemplary way of making sense of the past which shaped historical thinking in most, if not all cultures for a very long time. It was exactly this logic of historical thinking against which the specifically modern one, the logic of genetic sense generation, was opposed. Exemplary thinking was interested in deriving general rules of human conduct from special cases of historical events. Historical experience was a great shelter of morality and political insight (historia magistra vitae). At the end of the paper an idea is presented how this mode of thinking in the humanities can be furthermore developed in respect to the concept of humankind as a basic category of understanding.