Historical consciousness absent
07
Feb
There are two conceptions that mark ideas about contemporary history: one
of positivist reasoning we owe to Karl Popper, who misrepresents Karl Marx, but he wrote against “historical determinism” even though he wanted to make his theory a “scientific socialism “The other, which poses a positivist and skeptical view of possible changes and transformations within historical consciousness, such as the end of history.
There are those who call all this from “practice” in opposition also incorrect to theory, because nothing more theoretical than a bad practice and nothing more practical and present in life than a good theory.
The importance of rethinking historical consciousness, not instrumentalized and in deep dialogue with humanity, comes from Hans-Georg Gadamer, although the proponents of the “scientific-historical” currents above say that this is only a theoretical reflection of history, for That their practice is so bad and of little fertility.
Is there historical being? Do we conceive ourselves with this being? (Gadamer, 2007, p. 307), so one can see how much theory and life it is. That there is no historical reflection.
What would this being be in time? By borrowing from Heidegger’s reflection that Gadamer is also an heir, the answer is very simple as well: “tradition is essentially conservation and as such is always active in historical changes” (Gadamer, 2007: 373) We are impelled not to change, even if we think and desire change, today how much to change!
We can think and why it does not change, with so many attempts and today we can say almost two centuries if we think of the great crisis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mercantilism and industrial revolution, with serious consequences in European and then world wars, but at the root of this crisis is the thought (theoric?),
About what we think about democracy, social life and conceptions of economy.
The successive author-referenced thinking of various currents, beliefs, and theories is the problem of ‘tradition’, as described by Gadamer: “It is not history that belongs to us, but we belong to history” (Gadamer 2007, 367), that is, we are the fruits of our time, in the “theoretical” way of thinking and its instruments.
GADAMER, H-G. Verdade e Método (Truth and Method: Fundamental traits of a philosophical hermeneutics). Petropolis: Voices; Bragança Paulista: Editora Universitária, 2007.
