hayden white metahistory the historical imagination in nineteenth century europe

If White is a transcendentalist, as I think he is, then it is quasi-transcendental as the nature of the ground is figurative. The objectivity, in White’s account, is not erased, but appears as figural object. What characterizes White’s interpretation, I argue, is a catachrestic formalism. Now, If White is intrinsically a hermeneutic thinker who questions the separation of fact and interpretation his hermeneutic enterprise has a Kantian aspect (of historical reason) of a transcendental-formalist kind. However, it is not only the critics of history, White’s favourite example is Claude Levi-Strauss, who insist on the “mythopoetic” aspects of the historical discourse, but the great practitioners of history themselves, say, Jacob Burckhardt or Ranke, to take two distinct examples, dwell on the artistic and the poetic, if not the speculative-theological, ground of history. According to White, the modern positivism on the one hand and the Philosophy of History on the other consolidate the oppositions (fact and interpretation, objectivity and imaginary, scientific and artistic). Hayden White has challenged the veritable intellectual tradition that since the time of Aristotle rests on the distinction of poetry (imaginary) and history (real).

Hayden white metahistory the historical imagination in nineteenth century europe