Some Phenomenological Reflections
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper starts with a juxtaposition of the Kantian and Hegelian views on the history of philosophy, which at first glance would arouse the impression, that the historiography of philosophy is either heuristically trivial or intellectually dogmatic. As a third challenge to the issue, Heideggerˇ¦s infamous attempt of doing ˇ§violenceˇ¨ to the history of philosophy is discussed. In face of all these dangers, some early Heideggerian views on the issue are introduced, in which the history of philosophy is understood and made sense of with reference to the phenomenon of human life and to the situativeness of human Dasein itself. With this as backdrop, the paper enters into a main, reflective section in which some basic tenets regarding the historiography of philosophy and the role of the historian of philosophy are outlined, tenets such as: the Kantian distinction between philosophy in scholastic sense and in cosmic sense, the existential nature of human situation and of philosophical problems, the discrepancies in situations of the historian and the historical past, orientations toward the past and the future, the question of proactivity, the question of progress, simplicity and complexity in periodization and nomenclature, the notion of development and of context, etc. In the last section, the paper concludes with a brief demarcation between the historiography of objective reconstruction and the historiography of open perspectives, and suggests that only by developing the latter on top of and beyond the former is it possible for the historiography of philosophy to be historically trustworthy and philosophically meaningful. Such a combined programme also allows us to keep the Kantian and Hegelian challenges of the issue at bay, so that historiography of philosophy can be rendered methodologically proactive on the one hand and thematically open to innovative reflections and meaningful reinterpretations on the other. It is with this understanding that some degree of ˇ§violenceˇ¨ in the historiography of philosophy is tolerable or even justifiable.