Abstract

The existential approach to the philosophy of history focuses on the question of the meaning of history for human life. Do human beings have any agency within history? Do we create history, or are we created by it? How are we to bear the smallness of our own lives within the grand sweep of human events? How do we handle the duality of being both historical persons and biological entities, an animal species both like no other animal, because essentially cultural and, therefore, essentially historical, but in so many ways also just like any other animal? Then there’s the problem of how historicity can lead to relativism in ethics; do our values and moral sentiments have any objectivity or universality at all, any validity, or are they themselves just historical phenomena, like any other, totally prone to historicity? By briefly surveying the philosophy of history in three central figures, (Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault), and looking over the main narrative structures used, we can touch on several of the major themes and see how they inform us about today’s world events.