Historicity

Defining Historicity

Understanding the importance of historicity requires us first to differentiate the term from the conventional view of history. History in normative terms involves a remembering of dates, events, and persons that influenced phenomena in time. For instance, the battle of Waterloo is central for France, England, and the United States. It is a historical fact that George Washington was the first president of the United States. We can trace our genealogies, finding family roots in countries other than the United States, unless we are a descendent of the original Americans. We can keep the events [Page 329]of history straight with dates and periods, organizing given activities in particular ways, even as we contend over the viability of historical periods. Additionally, there can be contention about the significance of dates, the people, and the facts remembered. If one travels to Quebec, one finds not an understanding of a history of liberation, but a history about English conquest. In short, we have a normative view of history that orders events for remembering and attention. That effort now comes with persistent challenge: What voices and perspectives were omitted by those in power? How did the victors shape the identity of history?

Historicity does not eliminate questions about history. A people need a history to claim an identity that transcends their immediacy. For many, history is more rhetorical or persuasive than we once considered it to be, starting from the first argument about the contemporary field of history: Is it a social science or is it part of the humanities? The argument, crudely put, is an argument over the center of history: data or human story. Historicity aligns closer with a humanities and story-laden view of history than with a social science view. Historicity is one way of entering a story about history.

Historicity is an interpretive entrance into human existence. A working definition of historicity includes the following elements: question, bias, and response. Historicity is the announcement of a question that is engaged in and, through a given bias, culminates in a given response. After a response is rendered to a given historical moment, there is and will always be contention, just as there is with the notion of history. Historicity does not speak to us in pure terms, requiring us to have some form of prophetic vision to understand it properly. Historicity is better understood not as a way in which we know, but as a manner in which we engage the world in dialogue—we are not in total control of what comes to us, and we cannot offer an objective reading of a given question that will last for all time. Historicity is the communicative partner that existence gives us. Just as we are sometimes frustrated with real people, our own communicative partners, this same frustration can and does happen as we meet existence in conversation. Historicity does not necessarily bring us what we want; it opens the door to our engagement with what is before us. Historicity is the shaping of who we are in response to the questions that existence brings to us in everyday life, with our responsiveness shaping our identities.

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