Subjectivity and the Ontology of History

Abstract

The of history has only become a philosophical problem relatively recently within modern philosophy as a result of the change in the meaning of ontology and reflection on the idea of history. The practice of history, the writing of historical documents, is very old and already well developed in ancient Greece, for instance in the writings of the Greek historians such as Thucydides and Hesiod. But philosophical reflection on history only began much later. It is significant that at the beginning of the modern tradition, Descartes still understood history as a fabula mundi, since from his philosophical angle of vision a specific theory of historical knowledge was neither necessary nor possible. As part of the much discussed post-structuralist turn to post modernism, at present numerous writers, most prominently Derrida and Habermas, but also Foucault, and others have become apprentices in the new trade of overcoming metaphysics. For such thinkers, the understanding of derives mainly and uncritically from Heidegger's view. According to Heidegger, who distinguished between beings, or entities, and their Being, that is the Being of beings, what he calls the Seinsfrage, in his early formulation the question of the meaning of Being, has been forgotten since the Early Greeks. In his view, since the pre-Socratics, certainly as early as Aristotle, another, inauthentic view of metaphysics arose, namely the conception of being as an entity, which has since dominated the discussion. But the original, authentic conception of metaphysics lies hidden behind the continued accretion of the later, false tradition, which must be destroyed in order to revive the correct approach.