什么是历史,怎样做历史研究

On What History Is and How History Research Should Be Done

对历史一词的认知,概括起来有两个释义:一有对历史本身的释义,是“自然界和人类社会的发展过程”,或是称为“过去的事实”“过去的存在”;二是对历史学的释义,是“过去的事实的记载”。这样的认知已固化在人们的头脑中,其实这只是一个直观历史的表面现象的描述,用梁启超的话说,就是“解剖”历史的认知,没有说清楚历史的本质,不具有哲学理论的高度。换用梁启超“鸟瞰”的观察方法,准确地表述“什么是历史”,用一句话概括就是“在一定的时间和空间范围内存在的物与人和事就是历史”,即历史的本质存在于一定范围的时空之中,也就是历史存在的两个条件时间和空间,缺一不可。由于空间无限大,人们短暂的时间感知不到它的变化,而时间是一个矢量,永远沿着直线向一个方向飞进,即时间瞬间而逝,时间不回流,也就是消逝的历史不再现,即不可知。我们已知的历史是人类发明语言文字后留下的记忆,所以人类社会上百万年,已知的历史只有五千年到一万年,因流畅语言的产生只有一万年,文字的产生只有五千年,消逝的原生态历史已不可知,已知历史是历史家凭语言文字记载的历史记忆重新复制的历史。原生态历史只有一个版本,而语言文字留下的复制品历史可以有若干版本。因此历史研究,就是对已知复制品历史作复盘研究,揭示作者的历史观,运用推论升华复制品历史,使之无限接近全生态历史。

Looking up various contemporary dictionaries,the cognition of the word“history”can be summarized into two definitions:one is the definition of“history”itself,which is“the development process of nature and human society”,or“past facts”and“past existence”;the other is the definition of“history”,which is“the recording of past facts”.Such cognition of“history”has been solidified in people’s minds,in fact,it is only a description of the surface meaning of“history”in intuition,and in Liang Qichao’s words,it is only the cognition of“anatomy”of history lack of philosophical implication and cannot clarify the nature of history.On the basis of Liang Qichao’s“bird’s-eye view”observation method,“what history is”can be clearly understood and summarized in one sentence:“Objects,people and things that exist within a certain range of time and space are history”,that is,the essence of history exists in a certain range of space and time or the two conditions for the existence of history is time and space,and both are indispensable.Because space is infinite,people cannot perceive its changes for a short time;plus time is a vector,always flying in one direction along a straight line,or,time passes away instantly never back more,so the history in time is unknowable.The history we know is the memory left by human beings after the invention of language and writing;the known history of human society is only 5,000 to 10,000 years,because the production of fluent language is only 10,000 years,and the production of writing is only 5,000 years,that is,the lost original ecological history is no longer known,and the known history is the history that historians reproduce with the historical memory recorded in language and writing.In addition,there is only one version of the original history,while the reproduction history left by the language can have several versions,and therefore,historical research is to study the known replica history,reveal the author's view of history,sublimate the replica history by inference,and make it infinitely close to the whole original history.