by Eugene Gorny
1. History is a narrative about the past events. The difference between historical narrative and chronicles or annals is that a historian not only records the facts in their chronological succession but also demonstrates their interrelation, i.e. he gives a philosophical explanation of causes and effects which connect these events with each other. Thus, history performs a twofold function: first, it narrates about the past events; second, it explains them, i.e. it endows them with a meaning.
2. Any phenomenon undergoing change in the course of time can be an object of historical investigation. A phenomenon which does not change in time has no history and cannot be described historically. Therefore, history is not so much a description of objects but rather of events or processes occurring with them. Event can be defined as a significant change in the state of affairs, and the process as a succession of events. Thus, mutations and changes are the universal subject matter of history.
3. In order to be able to describe changes occurring with an object, it is necessary to specificate discrete static states in which it abided in certain moments of time and then to connect them with each other by cause-effect relations. A historical object, therefore, is constructed as an aggregate of entities that are not identical in time but are thought of as a unique object successively passing through various states.
4. The object ceases to exist in two cases. First, when it ceases to change and, thereby, it falls beyond the reach of the methods of historical description. Second, when the changes, which the object undergoes, are considered to be so significant that the object loses its identity. In the latter case, another object or a group of objects may come to take its place.
5. Since history is not only a record of events but also a reconstruction of their meaning, a historical narrative inevitably includes two discursive elements or modi - a description (of facts and events) and a meta-description (their explanation). The balance between these two modi can be realized in different ways, which defines various sub-genres of historical narrative. The dominance of description approximates history to fiction; the dominance of meta-description to philosophy. Herodotus' Histories can serve an example of the former, Hegel's Lectures on philosophy of history an example of the latter.
6. Historical narrative, as any text in classical sense, quoting Aristotle, has the beginning, the middle and the end. It is suggested that the text in the classical sense is a linear narrative as opposed to hypernarrative in which the reader can choose between various successions of reading the text.
7. The finitude of the narrative implies the finitude of the object of description (and vice versa). Therefore, the ideal object of history is an object which existence came to the end. The stages of the change of the objects are often described as emergence, growth, maturity, decline and death. In order to become a historical property the object must complete the whole life cycle. Thus, the object of history is that which had place in the past but which does not exist anymore. Historical description of the objects which existence continues is not possible. Or, at least, it presupposes trespassing beyond the bounds of history in the proper sense of the word into the realm of prognoses and prophesies in order to postulate the conditions under which the existence of the object will be ceased.
9.2.2003
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