HEGEL AS A “PHILOSOPHICAL HERODOTUS”

The paper aims to clarify what means “original history” in Hegel’s lecture on the ways of treating history. A brief survey of some occurrences of “original” (“ursprünglich”) in Enlightenment and Romantic historiography (Gatterer, Friedrich der Zweite, Schlözer, Herder, Wegelin, J. v. Müller, Boeckh) shows that “original” was to be considered the historian who witnessed the facts he narrates. For a large part of German historical scholarship the model of the “original” historian was Herodotus. In his lecture Hegel too pointed out Herodotus as prototype of the original historian in the very same accep- tation. This and other items show in what extent Hegel’s lecture took in account the terms and the topics debated in the theory of historiography of his time. Nevertheless, in Hegel’s argument, this is not enough: to be “original”, the historian also must have a deep and immediate involvement in the object of his account. His witnessing should be integrated by a true spiritual contemporaneity. This gnoseological condition for a real “original” historical achievement consists, above all, of a spontaneous belonging to the “ethos” of one’s own people and culture. This brings out another facet: since an “original” historical work is in some extent also the historian’s self-representation, it ends up into the same category of facts that it has reported, falls back into the historical evidences it gathered: it is both knowledge and document, original and originary, a kind of subject/substance snap-shot. Hegel’s intent becomes clear: he want to be the a new Herodotus, i.e. the original historian of world history, in order to provide a global “originality”.