The expression ‘history’ has various significations with which one view neither the science of history nor even history as an Object, but this same entity itself, not necessarily Objectified among such significations, which this entity is understood as something past may well be the pre-eminent usage. This signification is evinced in the kind of talk in which we say that something or other “already belongs to history”. Here’ past’ means “no longer present-at-hand”, or even “still present-at-hand indeed, but without having any ‘effect’ on the ‘Present’ “. Of course, the historical as that which is past has also the opposite signification, when we say, “One cannot get away from history.” Here, by “history”, we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still having effects. Howsoever, the historical, as that which is past, is understood to be related to the ‘Present’ in the sense of what is actual ‘now’ and ‘today’, and to be related to it, either positively or privatively, in such a way as to have effects upon it. Thus ‘the past’ has a special double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and despite that, it can still be present-at-hand ‘now'-for instance, the remains of a Greek temple. With the temple, a ‘bit of the past’ is still ‘in the present’.
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We next have in mind that the term “history” is not so much ‘the past’ in the sense of that which is past, but rather derivation from such a past. Anything that ‘has a history’ stands in the context of a becoming. In such becoming, ‘development’ is sometimes a rise, sometimes a fall. What ‘has a history’ in -this way can, at the same time, ‘make’ such history. As 'epoch-making', it determines 'a future' 'in the present'. Here “history” signifies a ‘context’ of events and ‘effects’, which draws on through ‘the past’, the ‘Present’, and the ‘future’. On this view, the past has no special priority.
Further, “history” signifies the totality of those entities which change ‘in time’, and indeed the transformations and vicissitudes of men, of human groupings and their ‘cultures’, as distinguished from Nature, which likewise operates ‘in time’. Here what one has in view is not so much a kind of Being-historizing-as it is that realm of entities which one distinguishes from Nature by having regard for the way in which man’s existence is essentially determined by ‘spirit’ and ‘culture’, even though in a certain manner Nature too belongs to “history” as thus understood. Finally, whatever has been handed down to us is held to be ‘historical’, whether it is something that we know histologically or something has taken over as self-evident, with its derivation hidden.
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