The study searches for, and breaks open, paths to the philosophical understanding of human historicality which may reveal both the ontological-historical identity and particularity of man, and the ontological origins of historiology, making them more comprehensible at the same time. The research reveals and articulates these divergent roots or origins in the finitude of human existence, or in the multiplicity of man’s all-time existential relation to it, in a critical dialogue with both tradition and contemporary philosophies of history. Within these, pre-eminently with the dialogues which scholarly research – albeit in a perhaps surprising way and horizon – undertakes nowadays with both Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Martin Heidegger’s pertaining thoughts. The summary of the meditations leads in fact to the recognition that: history exists because human death exists; or, more precisely, because there exists living being which relates to its death in its being, in and by its modes of being – explicitly or implicitly – in a being-like way. For which death, its own death is not a mere givenness but – by how it relates to it – a possibility in fact. And a possibility which, together with its all-time “substantive” occurrence, that is, dying – precisely by it yet always also above it! – originates as well as structures, articulates, permeates and colours all (other) being modes and possibilities of this living being’s being. That is, it opens them up, structures them open in reality, in, and precisely by, its finitude. By this, it also lends them an articulate gravity – open onto this finitude – constitutive of history. Thus, it articulates these modes of being truly as living history. [*]
[*] The study was written with the financial support of Domus Hungarica Artium et Scientiarum of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The quotation marks around the expression “philosophy of history” are to highlight the fundamental situation that the subject of what follows here is not the “philosophy of history” in any kind of disciplinary sense – that is, as a particularly outlined and defined “branch” of philosophy or philosophical research – but precisely the nature of philosophical inquiry about history – together with its thematic peculiarities, outlines, weight and motivations – as outstandingly a mode of being, which existentially and ontologically pertains to the inquiring subject itself, to its being, with particular regard to the possibilities of this being. This is why I added the term ontology of history as clarification, without quotation marks.
