Historicity (philosophy)

Historicity in philosophy is the idea or fact that something has an historical origin and developed through history: concepts, practices, values. This is opposed to the belief that the same thing, in particular normative institutions or correlated ideologies, are natural or essential and thus exist universally.

Historicity relates to the underlying concept of history, or the intersection of teleology (the concept and study of progress and purpose), temporality (the concept of time), and historiography (semiotics and history of history). Varying conceptualizations of historicity emphasize linear progress or the repetition or modulation of past events.

In phenomenology, historicity is the history of constitution of any intentional object, both in the sense of history as tradition and in the sense where every individual has its own history. Of course, these two senses are often very similar: One individual's history is heavily influenced by the tradition the individual is formed in, but personal history can also produce an object that wouldn't be a part of any tradition. In addition, personal historicity doesn't develop in the same way as tradition.

Martin Heidegger argued in Being and Time that it is temporality that gives rise to history. All things have their place and time, and nothing past is outside of history.

Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, famously argued that the collapse of Soviet communism brought humanity to the "end of history" whereby the world's global dialectical machinations had been resolved with the triumph of liberal capitalism.

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