追寻历史学的价值——评海登·怀特《元史学:十九世纪欧洲的历史想像》

On Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

海登.怀特的《元史学:十九世纪欧洲的历史想像》代表了20世纪下半叶西方历史哲学的重要成就。在书中,海登.怀特认为自己获得了两项理论成果,一是确立历史作品普遍存在着的诗学本质;二是展示了一种被称为"历史的"思想模式的一般性结构理论。史学有文学的特征;但史学不等同于文学。历史学是一个追求真实而又无法达到完全真实的过程。

Hayden White＇ s Metahistory ： The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe represents the very important accomplishment of western philosophy of history in the late 20th century. Hayden ·White thinks that he has made two theoretical achievements in this book ： one is that he illustrated the poetic nature of historical writing ; the other is that he presented a general structural theory of what is called “historical thinking pattern”. Historiography has the feature of literature, but it is not equal to literature. It means to reconstruct historical reality but this goal can never been fully achieved.