Phenomenological Time, Historical Time, and The Writing of History

Abstract

Abstract Contrary to Paul Ricoeur’s claim that there is an unbridgeable chasm between phenomenological time and historical time, my studies have shown me that the former is the cognitive foundation for the latter. The temporality formed in each sentential judgment can be discerned through a stylistic analysis of its grammar. This grammatical foundation which is established at the pre-reflective level of sentence formation becomes a basis in the maturing individual for conceptual preferences. How experience is organized informally and consequently reflected upon in the everyday judgment, or more formally in the writing of history, are outcomes of this grammatical logic. What I term one’s ‘historical logic’ differs in categorically interesting ways in each person; for each person it is an invariant grammatical organization that guides attended experience informing a person’s sense of ‘history’ and its meaning over a career of thought. The grammatical organization itself stems from varying part-whole organizations that perceptually provide the form grammar then instantiates. The epistemological basis of my approach is developed from Kant and Edmund Husserl insofar as their conceptions of temporal generation in judgment. My grammatical analyses rely upon the transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky. In this essay, I show the invariant character of two distinct historical logics through the careers of thought of two Tudor-Stuart historians, G.R. Elton and his student Arthur Joseph Slavin, and two Tudor-Stuart personalities, Edward Coke and Francis Bacon. I have found historical logics to be intergenerational. Forms of historical logic are more than likely psycho-genetic, recurring in every generation. I have provided evidence for this claim in studies I have made of adolescents who have first come to master the well-formed sentence in personal expression. Among the implications of the findings here are that ‘objectivity’ as well as ‘historical objectivity’ are better understood as ‘multiply valid’ among the judgments of equally informed and keen observers and interpreters. There is an unbridgeable foundation that differentiates one person’s conception of temporal organization from another. Synthetically, we are separated in our judgments, even when we can arrive at analytical understandings of these differences.