Abstract

Ruins imply damage and manifest some initial order as loss. Ruins and the process of ruination concern not only material debris but also the process of mediation in time as a representation (copy) of an anterior, an original, a creative imagination, or the facts of reality. On the long run, this leads us to reflect on history, that is, the representation of historical facts outlined in different spatiotemporal units — or periods — on the ground of a conception of chronological and absolute time. Thus, this essay explores the topic of ruins by interrogating the idealist legacy of historiography striving towards its ideal telos with immanent causality, namely the realization of human freedom and the emergence of an individualist society. The assumed chronological history is based on an overall structure of movement in a hierarchical metric, identified as progress from the Original to the Reflection.