One of the most difficult problems in the persuit of theoretical knowledge is that of a serious account of history, in more than in a mere conceptual way, that ignores its events to its structures, or in opposite its structure to its elements; to produce not a theory of the system of history, or its environment in individuals, attempting and failing to shape it, alone; or to cope at all with the amount of reality, without capitulating to it or trying to forget about it, and artificially beginning anew. This is however not just a theoretical problem, it is a moral problem too, and namely the problem of the responsibility of the past before the present, and of the present before the past. It is the question, if we should save something, and in any way what we could save, from it, or if we are better off beginning anew; if we are to condemn history or to redeem its past ambition in present desire. Have we, in other words, still the capacity to save the phenomena - to preserve reality as a basis for understanding the future? And is that capacity, if lacking, related too to a lack of our own future, as we perceive it?
It is in some way too easy to just condemn the present for its unhistoricity, as the critique of the artificial way, in which history was held onto in the not so far past, was well justified; it was an understanding of history that was mostly justificatory, and not really that interested in understanding that in the past, what is most important, its contradictions, openness, contingencies. Nonetheless it provided a framework for understanding events, a timeline to sort one's attitude towards history by. Without such a clear understanding of what is important in the past, we are not (as some people think) left with additional possibilities, but at first only with overwhelming amounts of material. The reason this was no apparent at first (say, in the critique of the historical view of western society in the 60s), is that the first critics of it still had a clear understanding of the historical view they were criticizing, whereas today, that image almost completely vanished, and we are left with remnants of historical understanding, asserting itself ever more powerful without any content, and opposed to that a critique of an empty hegemony, that also imagines itself to hold the truth of historical material it itself is overwhelmed by.
The first way to escape this trap is first to admit historical ignorance, even where it might not be completely obvious at first. Even if I, for example, think I know a lot about the 20th century, I still do not know about most people that lived through it, what I heard are mostly stereotypes, as most sources are still left unread over the decades, and most beliefs I partake in are more clearly created for purposes of political propaganda than for neutral understanding. That does not mean I should suddenly start disbelieving everything, or deny history; it simply means I should recognize that my understanding is sorely limited by the questions I am even aware I don't know the answer to. And on top of that, most of what I know of, I don't understand. This is the more obvious way in which history is unintelligible, that I can, for example, know a lot about the history of wars in the 20th century, but still will be absolutely unable to answer any question as to why they really happened, they just did, and it is not at all clear that we understand why. In fact, this sense of confusion is, in my view, closer to the truth than an "understanding" in hindsight, that claims it knows why that, what almost everyone was surprised by, had to happen. The important question is, how this kind of understanding through not understanding is connected to memory or knowledge. I still have to know about these things to be, even retroactively, surprised by them; what I don't know, I cannot not understand, and that is also the reason why I believe so many people are not puzzeled more by the past, as they simply don't know more about the strange events that happened for example in late antiquity. But here then the question is precisely, how not be lost in that ignorance, and how not to confuse the genuine confusion of knowing, but not being able to understand, with the sheer unawareness of the facts of reality.
The question of justification here is more present in a more indirect way. When I think about, what I know or don't know anything about, the question is, what I accept as things to know or not know anything about, and these things then need to justify themselves as objects or topics of history. This is visible in the way in which "historical" is used as a predicate; it does not describe that what really happend, but that of which we find it worthy to know that it did. The falling away of the old "historical sense" allows us to think about history in a different way than this, to understand anything and anyone, that exists historically, as itself a historical being, as being worthy of study in this way. And so we then have a genuine connection of natural and human history, in that history and historical sociology, psychology, linguististics etc. really are the same discipline, as they study the same object, not one studying that what is "historical" and others what is "natural" about those same events of the history of humankind on earth.
The unknowledge of history therefore splits into various kinds of ignorances, that of cosmology, of geology, of biology, of anthropology (in the anatomical sense), and of sociology, as different kind of historical layers. (That the subjective systems do not specifically appear here has the important meaning that they mediate between anthropology and sociology, and that they are neither just neutral elements of a kind of mental anatomy, nor just socially constructed; but precisely because of that they cannot have a clear "history" as they are neither evolutionary nor cultural elements of a clear movement of events.) The kind of ignorance we talked about however was specifically about human societies, not about biological evolution or the origin of the solar system; it therefore is sociological ignorance. The loss of history is therefore the same as our inability to understand our society, or at least very closely linked to it, as was the previous picture of history an approximatory way of giving a picture of society, be it to affirm or condemn, but in either way to understand clearly what it is.
If however this human history, this knowledge about society, actually includes the relations and actions of all persons in history, not just those considered "historical", then our ignorance becomes much more obviously true, as does the falsety of previous attempts of knowledge based on specific ideologies of historical relevancy. However, this does not relieve us of our duty to have some level of understanding, as I still do believe that the fundamental question of the relation of the present to past history and future prospects is necessary, and cannot be ignored for the sake of empty invokations of complexity. Is there a way, to still salvage from history more than its bare facticity? And what does this have to do with the various kinds of self-reflections of history - can we actually discard the relevancies we now displaced, or don't they return in a new form?
Any attempt of understanding history, in the broadest sense of interpreting reality, has always this strange element, that we understand, that there is a fundamental difference between factual events and our interpretation, and that our interpretation is secundary to reality, but that we also need this interpretation to understand reality. The reason for this is, that any object of understanding, or further any substantial notion of truth, is based on a specific difference between what is substantial and accidental, what is relevant or irrelevant to that understanding; since otherwise, there would be too much reality to ever comprehend, and no way of understanding it. This is already the base principle of perception, and ever more true for any understanding that goes beyond a single object that even can be in front of me. Historical interpretation therefore is the only thing that creates permanence. For example: It is an interpretation to look at the various political acts in societies - which are things like writing laws, passing judgements, and deciding on a budget for a government - and not to see them as individual acts, but as acts of a larger system, let's say the state. The question, how to draw the boundary of this system, both in terms of responsibilities and time, then has dramatically different interpretations as its consequence, for example, if you think the history of the modern state begins in ancient Rome, medieval feudalism or in the events of the French revolution; or if it contains, or excludes, the military and police, the educational institutions, the medical system etc. (if they are part of the political state or merely a tool used by it). This question must be differentiated from two other factors: a) the self-consciousness of such connections in each such area; b) the coherence in various elements of society to each other and to society as a whole; which both can exist independently of whether you choose to even begin such a description of certain possible connection for relevancy in historical understanding. One could, for example, also begin with a criterion of relevancy and find that indeed such a thing did not exist; that also would be a result relevant to historical understanding. The fundamental question for any such investigation then are the limitations on our very capacity to make such differences of substantiality. What can we even imagine to be a way in which something is historically relevant?
The only criterion we can apply in turn are meta-revelancy criterions: which substantialities are themselves substantial and which accidental to history. And besides others, which maybe exist, the main criterion we can know is precisely a neutral historical one: what is generally, historically, understood to be relevant, what were the past criterions of importance. In this sense, while the history of ideas does not describe directly a history of substances, it describes a history of failed substantializations of the whole of history to a form. A truly fully relevant history of history then would be a history of these historicities, together with their downfall. It would include all past notions of structure and relevancy - from ancient theogonies to modern sociology - ending with the point in which none of them were fit to be relevant anymore - precisely the modern movement of ahistoricity, of pure contemporarity. It would make out of ahistoricity itself a historical category.
There are different ways of expanding this very general or abstract picture; I will give broadly two: one of a theory of self-destructive destiny, and one of the practical meaning of un-modern contemporarity.
The first one is a purely contemplative picture, which I developed some years back, and which I still find somewhat interesting as a very abstract idea to view history; however, it is too simplistic to describe most events. Nonetheless, I think I should describe it: If objectivity as such is the result of subjectivity, by a pure assumption of intersubjective communicability, as taken on faith, it is as flawed, at least, as this subjective basis of assumption, which is, as I described elsewhere, nothing but the fact that I don't understand myself. Now, this is however not immediately obvious in empirical facts; but it can become more obvious when looking at the closer environment in which the subject, as itself historical object, becomes its own topic of investigation, not in a subjective or formal-mathematical, or transcendental, but empirical sense. This movement goes through different levels of research: from cosmology to geology to biology to anthropology to sociology or history in the typical sense. Here we then also have an explanation on why it's called "history": because it's closest to that absurdity of the subjective mind we seek to explain. In any way, empirically, what can we find in that history? If we only look at the broadest of its events, we find at the biggest point of change, as it becomes known to us, the technological revolutions, the changes in the general structure of the relation between humanity and the rest of nature. There are four of these: agriculture, industry, nuclear power and the internet, happening around 10k years ago, 1750, 1945 and 1995. One can describe therefore five different stages of history: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial, nuclear and digital; and one can also see that they have each a different relation towards nature: being part of nature, being outside of nature but dependent on it, being parallel to nature, being parallel to nature as nature is dependent on it, and finally being alone with no nature left. This last stage can be understood in different ways: more practically, in that we actually have destroyed most of nature today, and more theoretically, in that a park is not wild nature, and a rain forest under satellite observation is not that far from a huge park; the natives Amazonians are only allowed to survive, as is well known, in the same way park animals are: as long as it doesn't hinder the "development" of it (and one could put in here a whole longer description as how todays environmental politics is based on simulation, on how Baudriallard is maybe more actual than Kantian notions of the beauty of nature etc.). In either way, nature disappears, and we have a nice, simple historical picture from nature to a human dominated earth. And what happens here to history? In the past, there was a sense of destiny, of direction; till in the 19th century it was clear there was such a thing as progress, and even the 20th century was brimming of it, in the revolutions and mass movements etc, but we seem to have lost that. How can we explain it? I think it is in fact quite easy, but only if we evade two also easy, but wrong answers. The first answer, that is obviously wrong, is the notion that we still have that goal, that destiny. It is easy to hold onto, but after the experience of the 20th century, of all of it, I don't think we can really hold on to that. It seems just to absurd to me, to speak of a direction or goal of history in the moment we burn it all down and after an age of destroyed dreams of the future. No, that would be way too easy, to simply continue with that. But it would also be unfair to the past to fall into the other common attitude, and that is to understand the disillusion with history as a form of enlightenment. It is not. Enlightenment was itself based on an idea of progress and the future; the current gloom is not merely the end of some fancy dream of human progress, it is the real end of an experience of destiny, of the future, shared by millions over many centuries. So how to reconcile this? I think there is, after all, a very simple third way to deal with this: to simply accept that destiny existeted, but now doesn't. Have we then destroyed it? No. We are too weak for that. We couldn't destroy those dreams, they survived under too many destructions of civilization. In fact, I think there is only one obvious option: that our destiny has been fulfilled. In that case, it must have been disappeared with its fulfilling moment, which only can mean: that our destiny was to be without fate; that its disappearance is its fulfillment, as a last act of reason's irony (List der Vernunft). After all, in all its development, nature was humanities fate. And nature is dead, because we destroyed it. Not god, nature is that what is dead; and in the same way that we are free from its commands, we are also at an end of the history that marked, from the beginning of agriculture to the complete transformation of earth to a human park, its domestification. The only future for us then is, to not become our own fate. We need to become responsible for having become gods.
This is a nice speech, a troubeling view perhaps; but also, too nice and simple a picture. I mentioned that a few times within that, because it is easy to lose sight of that, that really this is not accurate at all, but only describing a certain set of presumptions of history, of the development of technology being ascendent above anything else, about history being reducible to short descriptions of epochs (such as "hunter-gatherer and agricultural society", let alone the distinction of industrial, nuclear and digital, which are hard to draw and make the sociological implications even more unclear). Still, what is written there is true in a broad conceptual sense, but it demands at the end not a rejoicing about having found the truth, but the clarity that this means that there is not clear and present history at all; that the end, if indeed we are currently without destiny, and maybe our own fate and end, we need to start anew and look at this reality of the world. This is the more practical view of contemporarity. I take this term, with all its implications, off a talk from Detlev Claussen [https://archive.org/details/kritischetheorie2013], which is in my view still one of the clearest ethical pleas for theory today. If we live in a world, where at the same time there exists ascendent wealth and utter destruction, that are conditions for each other, then we cannot write a theory that excludes these differences and marks a nice historical "direction". In the broadest sense, we are our own fate, in that the absurdity of subjective impulses is, more than before, both the driving element of history and of its impasses; we are in a situation, where the Marxian description of humans making their own history is more correct than ever, but without any nature they can do that history on or for; the remanants of "nature" are the means of controlling others. A description, that wants to escape these dynamics, that wants itself not to become a control instrument, must make as much obvious, that today, there is no natural humanity, in the sense that biology is really, in a much stronger sense than understood in system theory, only an environment; it has become inventory. But at this point, the old idea of having a "natural" history of classes and class interests breaks down. Because the natural element has been replaced with virtual substitutes (as can be seen in the monetary system as in the larger economy), we cannot reduce the history to that of classes, as the objective conditions for them do no longer exist; the only things left are absurdities of individual existence, power dynamics, or various sorts, new "classes", that have no natural class relation but are purely subjective, or objectively constituted, but now against subjective insterests, not against interests against nature (more similar to intrigue than to revolt, fighting about status instead of against the external conditions of life); and the memory of the past with its substantive criterions of relevancies, which are projected aimlessly into the future. We have to take all that together: the past and the present, the absurdity of theory today, and its past necessity and substantiality, and the absolute discontinuity today, that some of these old elements live on in different places, in newly reanimated, often more zombified forms, and ask ourselves: can we even try to understand this? What does this truly mean before the past, and before this any future?
I think, like any truly dialectical analysis, the question changed when analyzing it. Ahistoricity as an historical category is not a mere loss of history; it is a loss of an illusion of simplified history, but with the loss of that illusion, and therefore that illusion itself, as a remnant and ghost. But we can still say something about what that ghost meanst to us today, or should anyway mean: that to us, the past means precisely it, this project or understanding of history as taming nature, and its future as the present with whichs problems we must live; but to it, the present still meant a dream, but too the nightmare of losing nature. What is maybe most important, is that this dream, of getting _and_ preserving nature, didn't work: controlling it made it equal to us, destroyed it in its own right. We made art and parks and resources out of nature, but it does not longer exist on its own terms, and therefore too no longer any ethical measure of "naturality". Or is this too a simplification? If nature still survived somewhere else, outside of this history of taming it, we maybe could find something else like it. We still have to reconcile with the fact that we can blow up the planet and transform any event into simulations; and we will not so easily, as a few hundered years ago, find solace in physics. But maybe we can find in the aspiration to responsility of our own terrible divinity a new nature, of which we can find then a true history, that can include too the various elements of failure of persuing it, by all kinds of people known and unknown in the records of time, which currently are excluded from the description of our current attainment of power that we call the history of mankind.
In this sense, we could actually save the phenomena, all of them. Sozein ta phenomena at last.
A short note at the end to the relation of this to redemption, or what can even be called redemption, as opposed to the attitude of condemnation sadly often present in various people trying to talk in a new way about history. Basically, it is too easy to think, that if we are after the past, that we are beyond it. Even in the most abstract or factual descriptions of history (such as elements of the simplistic picture described above), a certain attitude against "backwardness", of a direction of the future that some people are just not following along, is clearly visible. This can be a rejection of ideas - that we don't have to consider ancient beliefs because at that point people did not have the scientific apparatuses we have today - or of people and their moral actions, based on practices we now, at least to some extent, do no longer participate in. However, there is also a falso notion of redemption, which is maybe even more wrong; a kind of historical relativism, that simply says that every point in time had its culture, that it was justified in its own terms etc, and that because it brought about, in some convoluted way, the present, we should not judge it for what it is. But neither respect for elders nor anger against parents can produce historical knowledge or understanding. And it also is unjust to the real efforts and events done in the past, that we may yet still have to discover. The real redemption of history we have to conceptualize is the redemption of history from "history", of the real events from their appearance of inevitablity. This then does take on, in a quite direct way, a political implication. I agree with the remarks made, for example, by Snyder, that inevitability or eternity (which amounts to very similar things, as reductive modes of historical perception) produce political effects that threaten historical knowledge per se; but I disagree, that this can simply be resolved by positive historiography. The reason, after all, that we are as confused as we are, is not an absence, but an overabundance of information about historical events, that cannot become knowledge of history. as they do no longer fit the form of an idea of history, such as progress or stability, so that it becomes attractive to simply ignore these events alltogether. The honesty of a politics dedicated to saving the phenomena is decisevely non-political, in the sense of being opposed to political rational and tactics; it positions the ethical rationale of politics over politics itself. And it is precisely here where any sense of true redemption of history can be developed. Redemption not of big movements, of ideas not yet realized, but imagined to be; but of the real existence of these ideas in the minds of failed historical actors. Redemption here must mean a reconstruction of the history of contingent failures, which are not even apparent afterwards. This redemption is, as any selection of relevancy or meta-relevancy, arbitrary on some level; but it does then, within that, what we look at - society and its history - create an understanding of that kind of substantiality, which we were trying to find in the persuit of history. Any idea of history, and its representation in story and memory, is limited in what it can see by this arbitrariness of selection, which is present in every historical description in the selection of sources and interpretations; so it is difficult to see what can be "redeemed" as a whole, when it ultimately amounts to a glorification of whatever selection we might have chosen. But it is precisely the realization of that, that is the redemption of this true history, history itself, behind our ideas of it, from narration. By realizing that history is real, and not equal to the stories we construct about certain selections of it, we can understand that only the reflection on the criterion of selection itself, and the attempt to historically criticize and investigate it, can bring redemption to historical events forgotten by the story of history; because, if already for people and events, for which we know their names and dates and stories they told about themselves, we consider it the gravest thing to, after all that happend, forget about them, we may at least concieve of the ever greater crime we commit to those that have already been forgotten, to not realize that we have done so, that we have forgotten them, and that we are continuing to do so by the necessity of our limit of understanding of reality, by the sheer mass of it and by the pain included in realizing, that reality is real. Only in the depth of our own ignorance and the pain of estimated historical trauma we may redeem the reality of that what we can't conceptualize about ourselves, the reality that we were and are, and what it means for us to exist; only in the light of us being torn apart may the past yet see its future.