Philosophy of History

Hayden White (1928– 2018)

White, writing in the mid-1980s, addresses specific topics in his systematic, hierarchical architectonic of historical thought. Essays that take up certain topics, such as that of individual historians, tangential to his work, or the problem of temporality in narrativity, narrativity as a story form,, enable him to probe deeply into how past and present issues were formulated, and in many instances seen as seminal to his present thought. Looking at one essay, published in 1987 by White, we can see how the third phase of conflict through material argument (evidence) and its implications are developed. In “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” his views on narrative and temporality are presented, most deeply and clearly. White argues that the “form” of the narrative is always a “story.” Herodotus, of course, used his Greek term historia to mean both inquiry into the historical facts and a narrative “story” of what occurred. In this way, White's understanding, with the added dimension of how temporality is effected and how it affects thought, is that of Herodotus. The German language also has this bipolar meaning in the term “Geschichte,” which is both “history” and “story.”

White explains this conjunction of “story” and a chronology of factual occurrence beginning with a quote from Paul Ricoeur: