1、曆史的定義
History, in its broadest sense, is the totality of all past events, although a more realistic definition would limit it to the known past. Historiography is the written record of what is known of human lives and societies in the past and how historians have attempted to understand them. Of all the fields of serious study and literary effort, history may be the hardest to define precisely, because the attempt to uncover past events and formulate an intelligible account of them necessarily involves the use and influence of many auxiliary disciplines and literary forms. The concern of all serious historians has been to collect and record facts about the human past and often to discover new facts. They have known that the information they have is incomplete, partly incorrect, or biased and requires careful attention. All have tried to discover in the facts patterns of meaning addressed to the enduring questions of human life.
2、黑格爾觀點：曆史
According to Hegel, “One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it... When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
Thus, philosophy was to explain Geschichte （history） afterwards; philosophy is always late, it is only an interpretation which is to recognize what is rational in the real. And, according to Hegel, only what is recognized as rational is real. This idealist understanding of philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach （1845）:“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
3、黑格爾觀點：曆史的概念
After Kant, Hegel developed a complex theodicy in the Phenomenology of Spirit （1807）, which based its conception of history on dialectics: the negative （wars, etc.） was conceived by Hegel as the motor of history. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash, with each thesis encountering an opposing idea or event antithesis. The clash of both was “superated” in the synthesis, a conjunction which conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx would famously explain afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI’s monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublated in Napoleon, who reconciled the revolution with the Ancient Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel thought that reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in history. Through labor, man transformed nature in order to be able to recognize himself in it; he made it his “home”. Thus, reason spiritualized nature. Roads, fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructures in which we live are the results of this spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social progress as the result of the labor of reason in history. However, this dialectical reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was also conceived of as constantly conflicting:Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.
4、曆史的哲學所要回答的三大問題
Philosophy of history or historiosophy is an area of philosophy concerning the eventual significance, if any, of human history. Furthermore, it speculates as to a possible teleological end to its development—that is, it asks if there is a design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the processes of human history.
Philosophy of history asks at least three basic questions:
1.What is the proper unit for the study of the human past—the individual subject? The polis （“city”） or sovereign territory? The civilization or culture? Or the whole of the human species?
2.Are there any broad patterns that we can discern through the study of the human past? Are there, for example, patterns of progress? Or cycles? Or are there no patterns or cycles, and is human history therefore random and devoid of any meaning?
3.If history can indeed be said to progress, what is its ultimate direction? Is it a positive or negative direction? And what （if any） is the driving force of that progress?
Philosophy of history should not be confused with historiography, which is the study of history as an academic discipline, and thus concerns its methods and practices, and its development as a discipline over time. Nor should philosophy of history be confused with the history of philosophy, which is the study of the development of philosophical ideas through time.
5、曆史的客觀性
A text was reinvented every time when it was read. Meaning in a text was thus constituted by the reader, not by the author, whose purposes and intentions in writing it were more or less irrelevant. These ideas have encouraged the belief among many historians, especially in the United States, that the concept of historical objectivity is a myth invented by ruling groups or classes in society in order to suppress alternative versions of the past that express the aspirations of oppressed minorities. Women will have a different view of the past from men, African-Americans from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, gays and lesbians from heterosexuals, and so on; and far from it being the case that one of these views is true while the others are false, the fact is that each of them is true according to the perspective from which it is seen:African-Americans have their truth about the American past, for example, just as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have theirs. The only criteria for choosing between these different views are aesthetic and above all political.
6、曆史研究的目的
Moreover, the purpose of history as a serious endeavor to understand human life is never fulfilled by the mere sifting of evidence for facts. Fact-finding is only the foundation for the selection, arrangement, and explanation that constitute historical interpretation. The process of interpretation informs all aspects of historical inquiry, beginning with the selection of a subject for investigation, because the very choice of a particular event or society or institution is itself an act of judgment that asserts the importance of the subject. Once chosen, the subject itself suggests a provisional model or hypothesis that guides research and helps the historian to assess and classify the available evidence and to present a detailed and coherent account of the subject. The historian must respect the facts, avoid ignorance and error as far as possible, and create a convincing, intellectually satisfying interpretation.
Until modern times, history was regarded primarily as a special kind of literature that shared many techniques and effects with fictional narrative. Historians were committed to factual materials and personal truthfulness, but like writers of fiction they wrote detailed narratives of events and vivid character sketches with great attention to language and style. The complex relations between literary art and historiography have been and continue to be a subject of serious debate.
7、曆史研究的再定位
These developments can be seen as part of a broader reorientation of historical studies towards the end of the 20th century. Theories, whether Marxist or non-Marxist （such as modernization theory）, which measured everything in the past according to whether it furthered or impeded progress towards economic prosperity, political democracy, and equality of social opportunity, have been sharply challenged as the costs of economic progress have become clearer, from environmental degradation to social alienation. Class, whether based on economic position or social consciousness, has given way to a more complex mode of social cleavage, including gender, religion, national identity, and sexual orientation, none of which can easily be shown to be based purely or even principally on economic factors.
8、曆史和目的論
Hegel probably represents the epitome of teleological philosophy of history. Hegel’s teleology was taken up by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser or Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales School had demonstrated.
Schools of thought influenced by Hegel see history as progressive, too—but they saw, and see progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled. History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist, and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward “civilization”, and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the “End of History”. In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy, he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality.
9、曆史成為多麵學科
History in this postmodern mode has become a multifaceted discipline in which the old priorities of the political, the economic, and the social no longer obtain. Historians now study a staggering variety of subjects, from love and hate to smell and taste, from health and sickness to madness and fear, from childhood to old age, from water to smoke, from crime and justice to sex and pleasure, from tiny villages to great cities, from obscure individuals to huge collectivities, from seemingly irrational folk-beliefs to constructs of collective memory and forgetting. History has always been a diverse subject, but the sheer range of its concerns at the beginning of the 21st century is surely unprecedented.
All these are positive developments that have been greatly accelerated by the advent of postmodernism, of which poststructuralist theory is merely one among many different aspects. Many historians have greeted the spread of extreme scepticism and relativism about historical knowledge with alarm and even despair, but it too can be turned to good advantage, if it is treated as a challenge to historians to rethink the way they do things and the theories of knowledge on which their work implicitly rests.
10、對曆史本質的理解會影響對曆史的解讀和結論
However, the notion itself didn’t completely disappear. The End of History and the Last Man （1992）by Francis Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal democracies as the single accredited political system and even modality of human consciousness would represent the “End of History.” Fukuyama’s work stems from a Kojevian reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit （1807）.
A key component to making sense of all of this is to simply recognize that all these issues in social evolution merely serve to support the suggestion that how one considers the nature of history will impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history. The critical under-explored question is less about history as content and more about history as process.
11、曆史客觀性的客觀標準
Presumably, in fact, historians writing from, say, an African-American perspective do not simply believe that what they are writing is as valid as what White Anglo-Saxon Protestant historians are writing, but no more so; they believe, on the contrary, that they are right and those whose views they criticize are wrong, and that there are objective criteria by which the issues at stake can be resolved. Moreover, once the floodgates of total relativism are opened, they cannot be closed against ideas we do not like. If everything is true according to the perspective from which it is seen, then how can we refute racist or fascist views of the past? How indeed can we refute the ugly phenomenon of Holocaust denial, the belief that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that there was no systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis during World War II, if not by an appeal to criteria of evidence that transcend perspectives of any kind? In the libel action fought by David Irving, a British historian, against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court early in the year 2000over the latter’s accusation that Irving was a Holocaust denier who falsified history, the defence won precisely on the basis of a close examination of Irving’s writings that demonstrated he had inserted into quotes from documents words that were not in the original, relied on sources he knew to be forged because they supported his point of view, suppressed passages in texts that were inconvenient for his argument, and in general doctored the historical record in the interests of his political views, which the judge affirmed to be racist and extremist. If we were unable to identify the manipulation and falsification of historical sources in this way, on the grounds that we can read into them whatever we like, then refuting Holocaust deniers would be impossible.
12、認為曆史沒有客觀性這種觀點是自相矛盾的
Put in this extreme way, however, such views as that the concept of historical objectivity is a myth invented by ruling groups, are obviously self-contradictory. To begin with, presumably all poststructuralists believe that their own view of language, history, and truth is true and correct, not just from their own perspective but in a generally valid sense. They maintain, for example, that the view that there is a clear distinction between history and fiction is a false view. In order to maintain this position, they must concede that there are such things as truth and falsehood that are independent of any perspective. Once the principle of truth is conceded, it follows that there must be criteria by which truth can be distinguished from falsehood, in history as in everything else; criteria such as, for example, whether or not a proposition fits the evidence to which it applies.
13、對曆史的後現代主義挑戰
Is there such a thing as objective history or is objective history merely a myth? Is history simply a story told from a subjective point of view, usually that of the powerful who wish to perpetuate their rule? In this guest essay, British historian Richard J. Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University in England and author of many books, including Rethinking German History （1987）and In Defense of History （1999）, examines the theories of “poststructuralism”, or “postmodernism”, and the challenges they present to orthodox approaches to the writing of history.
14、社會進化論對曆史的理解
Inspired by the Enlightenment’s ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular conception in the 19th century. Auguste Comte’s （1798-1857）positivist conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by modern science, was one of the most influential doctrine of progress. The Whig interpretation of history, as it was later called, associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay, gives an example of such influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described the direction of progress as “from status to contract,” from a world in which a child’s whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his/her birth, toward one of mobility and choice.
15、階級鬥爭的概念
Class struggle is the active expression of class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, leading ideologists of communism, wrote “The written history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
Marx’s notion of class has nothing to do with social class in the sociological sense of upper, middle and lower classes （which are often defined in terms of quantitative income or wealth）. Instead, in an age of capitalism, Marx describes an economic class. Membership of a class is defined by one’s relationship to the means of production, i.e., one’s position in the social structure that characterizes capitalism. Marx talks mainly about two classes that include the vast majority of the population, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Other classes such as the petty bourgeoisie share characteristics of both of these main classes.
16、馬克思觀點：主要階級鬥爭
1.Labor （the proletariat or workers） includes anyone who earns their livelihood by selling their labor power and being paid a wage or salary for their labor time. They have little choice but to work for capital, since they typically have no independent way to survive.
2.Capital （the bourgeoisie or capitalists） includes anyone who gets their income not from labor as much as from the surplus value they appropriate from the workers who create wealth. The income of the capitalists, therefore, is based on their exploitation of the workers （proletariat）.
What Marx points out is that members of each of the two main classes have interests in common. These class or collective interests are in conflict with those of the other class as a whole. This in turn leads to conflict between individual members of different classes.
17、階級鬥爭不全是暴力的
Not all class struggle is violent or necessarily radical （as with strikes and lockouts）. Class antagonism may instead be expressed as low worker morale, minor sabotage and pilferage, and individual workers’ abuse of petty authority and hoarding of information. It may also be expressed on a larger scale by support for socialist or populist parties. On the employers’ side, the use of union-busting legal firms and the lobbying for anti-union laws are forms of class struggle.
18、階級鬥爭不全是對
Not all class struggle is a threat to capitalism, or even to the authority of an individual capitalist. A narrow struggle for higher wages by a small sector of the working-class （what is often called “economism”） hardly threatens the status quo. In fact, by applying “craft union” tactics of excluding other workers from skilled trades, an economistic struggle may even weaken the working class as a whole by dividing it. Class struggle becomes more important in the historical process as it becomes more general, as industries are organized rather than crafts, as workers’ class consciousness rises, and as they are organized as political parties. Marx referred to this as the progress of the proletariat from being a class “in itself” （a position in the social structure） to being one “for itself” （an active and conscious force that could change the world）.