Historicism’s dilemma

Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 144) neatly summarizes the dilemma of anti-Hegelian historicism, influenced as it was by the hermeneutical theories of Schleiermacher and later Dilthey. Here’s the problem: Historicism rejects the Hegelian notion that history has a definable end. But hermeneutics works in a circle or an oscillation between parts and whole. If, as historicists tend to say, history is a kind of “text,” then its parts have to be understood in terms of a whole. But they’ve rejected Hegelian closure, so there is no whole to related dialectically to the parts: “insofar as the truths of history are still to be learned, history is necessarily incomplete; yet only insofar as it is whole can any part of it be ultimately understood.”

Two observations: First, does this mean that we all must be “Hegelians” of some sort? Put differently, must we all assume an eschatological goal if we are to understand or learn anything from temporal events? Second, it is not hard to see how the dilemmas of postmodernism naturally arise from the dilemma of historicism: Chuck Hegel, and you chuck eschatology/teleology; chuck teleology, and you’re adrift with Derrida.