Does our technology make the past irrelevant to our future ? Beyond techno-determinism and social constructivism (original) (raw)
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The prevailing attitude sees historical knowledge as being part of the realm of language in the form of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors. Indeed, while history is mostly communicated through generations via written or oral means, the philosophical expression of history-its historicity-also exists in its non-linguistic manifestation, most saliently, through our built environment. I Historical expressivity I.I Historical knowledge Wilhelm Dilthey was particularly interested in the role that history played in our understanding of the present. Beyond the mere recounting or even the interpretation of events, for Dilthey, history has the capacity to liberate us, to set us free, because it "lifts us from the burden of present." 1 History gives us a larger and different perspective on our life so that we can realize that not everything is the way it appears to be for us in the present. For Dilthey, humanity cannot understand itself through reflection or introspection, but through history. He wants to emphasize that man's understanding is dependent on past worldviews, interpretations, and a shared world, so that there is a temporality to historical knowledge. 2 For him, human beings are historical beings, intertwined with the history of past lives and cultures. However, if this is the case, then those who write history are already writing it from a given philosophical point of view, imbued with the biases and philosophy of that particular historical moment: "history can tell him … never in objective concepts but always only in the living experience which springs up out of the depths of his own being." 3 Dilthey's ambitious project involves delving into the question of how historical knowledge is even possible. To tackle a possible answer, he makes a distinction between two forms of knowledge: knowledge of natural science and knowledge of humanities. For him, historical knowledge cannot be reduced to empirical knowledge of the past, rather, what makes historical knowledge possible is knowledge of humanities that are linked to certain categories that express humanity. In this text, the interest is in broadening the notion of how this humanity can be expressed, by first exploring Dilthey's categories of historical expressivity, and then proposing another realm that he leaves largely unexplored: that of the built environment-the architecture that has housed humanity.