ABSTRACT
What meaning can we give, after the demise of the grand narratives of European modernism, to Hegel’s conception of the absolute present of knowledge? Hegel’s legacy remains unsurpassable in that it signified that history has reached its destination. This knowledge absolutizes the present and transforms history into History. At the same time, however, it laid a curse on historical consciousness. Hegel’s truth is retrospective, it abandons the living to historicity, to imprisonment in time. Faced by this conundrum of historical consciousness the philosopher Agnes Heller asks what a theory of history can offer us today after the failure of the promise of philosophy of history. In A Philosophy of History in Fragments she examines our sense of historical existence as the question of living historically. In A Theory of History she finds the key to the sense of history in the changing self-understandings of historicity since antiquity. Both works share the same premise that today we can give meaning to the past and the future only as the past and the future of our present. The present remains absolute but it is a historically-bound, postmodern absolute that is yet to attain its full meaning as contemporaneity through the shared consciousness of planetary responsibility.
