ABSTRACT
Historical consciousness is just one ingredient of social and cultural consciousness, along with friendship and hostility, hope or despair, intention or regret, likes and dislikes, equality or inequality, wealth or poverty. Social or cultural consciousness in any case manifests itself only as it refracts into the individual consciousness. This chapter discusses the historicized world, which has three dimensions: a world that has already been shaped by history; a world that has detached itself from or superseded the way it used to be, because it had to, or because its historical self-comprehension hitherto had proved disastrous or become obsolete; and a world that compulsively keeps historicizing itself. The historicized action refers to history's self-historicization, its self-supersession whenever historical events historicize the prevailing historical assumptions based on historical events hitherto. The signs of the twentieth century being rubbed out, bleached, as if twentieth-century history were an inescapable imbroglio and disentangling the historical events that had led to it the only way out.
