The Ahistorical Study of Historical Thinking

Abstract

The article describes the assumptions of the Wojciech Wrzosek’s concept of historical thinking and historical narrative. Wrzosek sees historical thinking as a contemporary semantic web based on metaphors of the origin and the progress. The historical narrative plays in contemporary reality legitimizing and communicative functions completely independently of the real forms of historical reality, which in theory describes. Wrzosek sees the historical thinking as ahistorical and as the inbound element of contemporary reality. At the same time, however, Wrzosek defines thinking as itself as a historical phenomenon because it is based on the cultural and social experience. The historical thinking must therefore be historic because it is thinking, and not because its relates to the historical reality.