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Historical Contemporaneousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Eloy Benito Ruano

Extract

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Criticism of the traditional periodization of history (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern age), generally centered on the medieval period as the crucial point, has not even stooped to consider what is called the “contemporary age.” This new and poorly defined phase, proposed by the methodologists to inclose in history the events and times which immediately precede us or in which we live, has not in general been accepted as such a theoretical unity by those who have been occupied with the other pretentious “ages” in order to deny their equal validity.

In the ingenious and controversial scheme outlined here, certainly, the contemporary age represents a concept so artificial, so devoid of unified personality and feeling and of clear differentiation, that it only disturbs the already slight harmony of this controversial and antiquated system.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 5 , Issue 20 , December 1957 , pp. 21 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. "Modern [present] history which is ended was conceived in the epoch of the Renais sance. We are present now at the end of the Renaissance" (Berdiaeff, Una nueva edad media [Barcelona: Editorial Apolo, 1932], p. II).

2. H. Spangenberg, "Los Periodos de la historia universal," Revista de Occidente, III, No. 29 (November, 1925), 196.

3. Spangenberg, op. cit., pp. 197-98.

4. X. Zubiri, Naturaleza, historia, dios (Madrid, 1944), p. 407.

5. "The first characteristic that a historic being has to present is, paradoxically, that of its absence" (José Artigas, "La Historia contemporanea," Arbor, XXIII [1952], 214).

6. Zubiri, op. cit., p. 405.

7. H. Focillon, L'An mil (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), pp. 24-25.

8. R. Jungk, Die Zunkunft hat schon begonnen (Stuttgart: Scherz & Gavert, 1953); Spanish trans., El futura ha comenzado (Madrid, 1953).

9. Miguel Artola has dedicated to that "novelisticalness" of anticipation an interesting study in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, XXIV, Nos. 68-69 (1955), 150-67.