Author:

Abstract:

The question why we engage with the past has recently been reintroduced in the philosophy of history. To answer this question philosophers of history have fallen back on a rather traditional, or linear, notion of time. Putting the ethical emphasis either on the past and its victims or in a hope for a better future, these theories seem to be caught between a consequentialist and a deontological view on ethics. Even alternative theories as Hayden Whites idea of the practical past, seems to be limited to these classical distinctions (White 2014). In a first section of this paper I want to explore the possibility of a different ethical perspective on our relations to the past, both in a historiographical and in a more personal, or practical, way. When Paul Ricoeur defines our historical condition he states that "[n]ous faisons l'histoire et nous faisons de l'histoire parce que nous sommes historiques" (2004). But the ontological and existential implications of this historical being have not been fully explored in the light of this debate. By combining Ricoeurs notion of the historical condition, typical for our modernity (Ricoeur 2004), with his insights on our narrative identity and the narrative, or hermeneutical, ethics attached to that idea (Ricoeur 1990), this paper will formulate an intrinsic ethical perspective on our historical being. In a second part this paper will move from the existential and ontological considerations towards the epistemological implications of this ethical perspective. By shifting the ethical responsibility from the outside, either in the past of future, to an intrinsic ethical perspective on historical representations, the classical opposition between ethics and epistemology or between facts and values, disappears and the existential, ontological and ethical groundwork of the first section will have an immediate impact on these epistemological questions.