ABSTRACT
In producing the tools, artefacts, and structures their life depends on, human beings create not only their living conditions, but also themselves. This is ‘the primary act of history’. Because the technics for human self-determination require intelligence, history forms a ‘spiritual link’ between individuals (Aron 1986: 44). Aron’s thinking is essentialist and psychologistic: ‘By his very essence man creates documents since he extends the action of his body by means of instruments and all his creations reveal immediately the activity of a mind’ (Aron 1986: 37). But stressing this aptitude of human beings to make things, hence to make themselves, also makes history [rg] a form of techne. This in turn makes historical scholarship [crg] a technasma, an artful device, for comprehending what human beings both have made and have made of themselves. This is the basis of historical sense and meaning. It makes history both the ‘‘official knowledge’’ of the academic world and technocratic e´lites, and society’s ‘‘unofficial knowledge’’ of itself. Hence, ‘historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilisation already advanced.’ History is a ‘perfected means’ of solving the problems that get increasingly complex as ‘life gets gradually better’. It has ‘a great deal of the past at its back, a great deal of experience’ and is ‘most plainly attached to the advance of a civilisation’ (Ortega y Gasset 1964: 91). From this perspective, history [crg] is a technology that enables humanity to communicate with itself, to inform itself about itself (cf. Schna¨delbach 2000: 137). History, connecting (subjective) human motivation and its (objective) effects, the psychologistic and the technical, is thus the cleverest technological invention. It’s a technology of technologies.
