將人文學放在歷史視野中：關於人文學的脈絡化與理解的理論思考

Historizing Humanity--Some Theoretical Considerations on Contextualization and Understanding Regarding the Idea of Humanity

本文的目的在提供一個最新的歷史觀點。這個歷史觀點旨在涵蓋跨文化溝通的所有領域，同時包含文化認同的基本議題，因此它可做為歷史意識的共同觀點。本文首先簡短論述何謂「人」，意即具有歷史意義與人之本體面向的人。為了賦與屬於人類，甚至生物範疇的「人」一個歷史面向，必須在時間發展的語境中進行討論。在這個語境脈絡之下，「人」成為人在面對現實生活中多樣、互異、而且變遷不居中的文化定位時的一個自我投射的基本類別。同時，「人」也成為一個歷史知識的議題。它表達人對過去的自我認識，而且這個自我認識也藉由與現代認同成形的文化過程建立關聯，而成為一個歷史知識的議題。在草擬這個歷史思維的理論架構時，本文強調文化差異與跨文化溝通既是歷史經驗的議題，也是認同建構的議題。藉此，本文認為我們可以在文化定位的層次上，尤其關注文化差異與認同，以因應全球化的挑戰。

Contextualising and understanding is not a new issue in the humanities. On the contrary: they belong to the basic assumptions of their specific early modern way of dealing with the human world in academic discourses. They originated in the fundamental change in historical sense generation from the exemplary to the genetic mode at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. They became essential for the academic disciplines of the humanities with their rational approach to the human world. This can easily be made possible by referring to the pregiven dominating way of doing history in pre-modern times. Here it was the exemplary way of making sense of the past which shaped historical thinking in most, if not all cultures for a very long time. It was exactly this logic of historical thinking against which the specifically modern one, the logic of genetic sense generation, was opposed. Exemplary thinking was interested in deriving general rules of human conduct from special cases of historical events. Historical experience was a great shelter of morality and political insight (historia magistra vitae). At the end of the paper an idea is presented how this mode of thinking in the humanities can be furthermore developed in respect to the concept of humankind as a basic category of understanding.