Phenomenology and the experience of the historical

Abstract

Twentieth Century philosophical accounts of history have been dominated by two paradigms: our relation to history either takes the form of a representation of the past, or the historical past is conceived as a sociological phenomenon of collective memory. Whereas the defenders of the representationalist approach are primarily interested in history as a story that can be known and fixed through the elaboration of a narrative discourse (e.g., Hayden White, Arthur Danto, W.B. Gallie, Louis Mink), advocates of the memory-oriented approach (e.g., Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Paul Ricoeur) are more typically interested in discerning and analysing the psychological effects of our collective relation to our past. Beyond their unmistakable differences, these two tendencies have a common dominator, which provides David Carr with the starting point of his reflections on history: ‘‘On both of these accounts, then, history is divided by a gap from what it seeks to find or wants to know, and its activity is seen by philosophers as that of bridging this or these gaps. This constitutes the problem to which the philosophy of history addresses