| The project in which I participate is called Beyond Historicism . Historicism can generally be defined as the Weltanschauung which places everything in its context. The historicist revolution at the end the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century still determines the theory and practice of all the humanities the writing of history, the analysis of society, culture, art, literature etc. It is with historicism as with the well-known fish never being aware of what water is, until the moment it is pulled out of the river by the fisherman s rod and line. Historicism is so much around us everywhere that we forget what it means to us precisely because of this. When we are so used to place everything in its historical context, is there no possibility of going beyond historicism? Will it be with us forever? In this project we try to figure out if there is life after historicism . If we want to go beyond historicism, we will have to approach historicism not from an anti- or ahistorical, but form an internal point of view. That is to say, we must begin with seeing historicism as indissolubly linked to the Western experience of society and culture and accept it as a stage that is and has been essential to the West s appreciation of itself. We can only catch a glimpse of what may lie beyond historicism after first having carefully worked our way through historicism . For this purpose German historical thought is especially a good place to begin since the history of historicism more or less starts there. In my thesis I will focus on the German historian Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) and his conception of history, which is historicism. Meinecke defined historicism as follows: Der Kern des Historismus besteht in der Ersetzung einer generalisierenden Betrachtung ( ) durch eine individualisierende Betrachtung . Historicism thus gives us insight in the identity or individuality of objects in their socio-historic reality. Within Meinecke s historicism I am especially interested in his conception or interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). According to Meinecke historicism more or less culminates in the neo-Platonic ideas of Goethe. The core of this conception of history is to be found in the so-called Individualitätsgedanke. With this concept of individuality Meinecke tried to see the past in the temporal and at the same time from the perspective of eternity. In this respect it is important to know that Goethe never conceived of the past as something vanished. For him the past and the present were one: Der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit . From this perspective a comparison can be drawn with the (sublime) historical experience that Frank Ankersmit writes about. In the historical experience there is no context; past and present are one. Ankersmit argues that through historical experience there is a way to go beyond historicism, furthermore he points out that historicism as a whole in the end tends to experience , thus, there might be an attempt to go beyond historicism in Meinecke s theory. |
