历史具有“本义”——驳西方后现代主义历史诠释学

History Has an“Original Meaning”——Refutation of Post-modernist Historical Hermeneutics

后现代主义历史诠释学认为,历史的意义完全靠史家“赋予”。此论之所以站不住脚,是因为历史具有“本义”,它由历史的缔造者赋予,而与史家无关。后现代主义历史诠释学的真正和典型的代表是海登·怀特的《元史学》,该书不仅把有关历史意义的“生成系统”即史家赋予历史以“意义”的论述,完全置于“与解释问题有关的历史书写”框架中展开,还提出了一种专门的“历史诗学”作为其理论支撑。“历史诗学”的核心虽然叫“转义理论”,但“转义行为”最终是通过“隐喻”来实现的,这就暴露了其历史诠释学乃至整个“历史诗学”的先验唯心论倾向。因为根据F.R.安克施密特的专门研究,“先验论哲学内在地是隐喻的,而隐喻内在地是先验的”,二者在性质上原本是相通的。

Post-modernist historical hermeneutics argues that the meaning of history is completely given by the historians.This argument is untenable because history has endowed itself with an“original meaning”,which is not given by the historians but by the creators of history.Hayden White and his Metahistory are the true and typical representation of the theory because it is in this book that White not only totally placed“the generating system”of the meaning of history,namely,the illustration on giving history the meaning within the framework of“historical writing relating to the question of interpretations”but also created“Poetics of History”as his theoretic foundation.We find that although the core of“Poetics of History”is called“the Theory of Tropology”,the“troping”is eventually achieved through“metaphor”.Hence,it reveals the tendency of transcendental idealism in historical hermeneutics as well as the entire“Poetics of History”since according to F.R.Ankersmit,“Transcendental philosophy is intrinsically metaphorical,and metaphor intrinsically transcendental”.Both of them are intrinsically connected in nature.