In this paper I present and criticise Reinhart Koselleck’s criticism of rationality in history. He identifies the sense of history with its rationality. He denies both the rationality of the totality of history and the rationality of a historical fragment. In his opinion, history in actu is senseless. It determines the cognitive status of historical knowledge. I agree with his criticism of the sense of the totality of history but I reject his concept of the senselessness of the historical fragment.
In this article, I will sketch a particular way of thinking about existence in time, the consequence of which would be practicing historiography as a response to the voices of the dead coming from the past. This theoretical conception of history tries to understand history not so much as an unfolding process of succession over time but as some community of the living and the dead. If the voices of the dead, defined in terms of spectrality, are to be active somehow in the present, they cannot be prematurely suppressed by gestures of closing the past understood as blocking the transmission of these voices to the future. After analyzing the problem of false closures in history, I am trying to understand spectrality that would combine both past and present activity. The article aims to propose tasks for a historiography that would consist in regaining in con-temporary culture the ability to hear the voice, the gaze, and the expectations coming from the past, present in various forms which can be grasped by an encompassing notion of spectrality. Reflection on spectrality brings us closer to the meaning of the concept of counter‑time.
In this article, I attempt to read a new monograph on historiography in the communist period, written by Rafał Stobiecki. The key concepts of the book are - in my opinion - gratitude and warning, spoken together. The author works on the basis of a broad understanding of the scope of research in the history of historiography. The author interprets not only (1) “research on the infrastructure of historical science”, which includes the institutional dimension of the historians’ milieu, but also (2) changes in the methodological assumptions on which historical research was based during the Polish People’s Republic and (3) the essential features of the representation of the past developed by the historiography of the People’s Republic of Poland. The author of the book emphasizes the warning, pointing to the need to evaluate the attitudes of historians. However, I focus my attention on gratitude, because it shows the achievements of our predecessors and their victories over the figures trying to subjugate them.
PL
W niniejszym artykule podejmuję próbę lektury nowej monografii dotyczącej historiografii w okresie PRL napisanej przez Rafała Stobieckiego. Kluczowymi pojęciami książki są – w mojej opinii – wdzięczność i ostrzeżenie, wypowiadane łącznie. Autor pracuje w oparciu o szerokie rozumienie zakresu badań historii historiografii. Autor obejmuje interpretacją nie tylko (1) „badania nad infrastrukturą nauki historycznej”, do których zalicza instytucjonalnego wymiaru środowiska historyków, lecz również (2) przemiany założeń metodologicznych, na których były oparte badania historyczne w okresie PRL oraz (3) zasadnicze cechy reprezentacji przeszłości wypracowanych przez historiografię PRL-u. Autor książki kładzie nacisk na ostrzeżenie, wskazując na potrzebę oceny postaw historyków. Ja jednak skupiam uwagę na wdzięczności, bo w jej świetle można ukazać dokonania naszych poprzedników i ich zwycięstwa nad figurami próbującymi ich podporządkować.
In this article I argue that what could contribute to creating trust today are historiographic forms of narrations that resemble testimonies made by witnesses of the past, which I have defined as the “substitute testimony”. The focal point of my considerations is, firstly, the difference between a substitute testimony and a testimony given by a witness of the epoch, and secondly, its attitude to philosophical criticism that analyses the issue of giving a testimony. My propositions are based on the theory of testimony by Ricoeur. According to it, a testimony is a narration created through communicating everyday reality. Building a substitute testimony means formulating suppositions with respect to the possibility of experiencing past events by their participants as well as historian’s creation of a personal, subjective involvement in the difficult historical issues.
In this article we refl ect on the theoretical foundations of Jerzy Topolski’s history of historiography. In the fi rst part of the text, entitled “On truth in historiography – pragmatically and idealistically,” Maria Solarska shows the relationship between Topolski’s theory of truth and his view of the community of historians, of that community’s methodological and ethical rules. In the second part of the text, “Historiography between truth and myth,” Maciej Bugajewski raises a question about Topolski’s defi nition of the diff erence between truth and myth. In our opinion Topolski wanted to see the history of historiography as the history of truth about the past.