Abstract

This essay attempts to relate Ernst Troeltsch's brand of historicism to Martin Heidegger's existential analytic of human existence. The focal point for this investigation is Troeltsch's Der Historismus und seine Probleme and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Both books appeared in the same decade and are responsive to the fundamental notions of time as duration and the independence of the human studies. Along with these two fundamental themes the essay explores historicism's challenge to the claims of classical metaphysics. Both Troeltsch and Heidegger, in their major works, have argued not only for the autonomy of the historical sciences, but have proposed philosophy's obligation to probe the depths of the historical and reveal the categorical significance of history. ;This essay traces the historical background to Troeltsch's and Heidegger's historical thinking. The tradition these two philosophers rest upon is sketched in chapter one, using Paul Tillich's interpretation of history. Given Tillich's views on history and the development of Western Philosophy, Troeltsch and Heidegger fall within the scope of developmental theories and historical speculation emanating from Romanticism and its reaction to Enlightenment Reason and universal history. Given the confusion and controversy surrounding historicist thinking, an effort is made in chapter three to distinguish Troeltsch's and Heidegger's historicism from the views of other thinkers. Karl Popper's refutation of historicism is pivotal in this respect. ;The essay is preceded by an introduction that justifies the consideration of history as ontology and concludes with the consideration of historicist 'man' as existentialist 'man'. These two themes are summed up in the effects that the models of making and doing, epitomized in Giambatistta Vico's seminal thinking, had upon traditional epistemological and ontological speculation. ;Troeltsch and Heidegger, in their own way, have continued the work of their predecessor Wilhelm Dilthey in developing a 'sense of history' that goes beyond the consideration of methodological issues in historiography. Der Historismus und seine Probleme and Sein und Zeit explore the consequences of what it means to 'stand in history'. Human existence, according to both authors is a hermeneutic enterprise to the core, and invariably where criticism in history is found so too is creation