>Historians, as Gadamer puts it, immerse themselves in the
>stream of history - history is like one extremely large text,
>and its events and epochs constitute chapters or books.
And yet, "history" can hardly be reduced to a diachronic/linear
model. While indeed it unfolds in time, it does not appear to me to
be a text, which to me implies being read diachronically (granted,
you may skip around, check the index, check the footnotes), but the
experience to me inferred by "reading" is one of diachronicity.
Rather I find history to be more synchronous, hence more like a
matrix.
>stream of history - history is like one extremely large text,
>and its events and epochs constitute chapters or books.
And yet, "history" can hardly be reduced to a diachronic/linear
model. While indeed it unfolds in time, it does not appear to me to
be a text, which to me implies being read diachronically (granted,
you may skip around, check the index, check the footnotes), but the
experience to me inferred by "reading" is one of diachronicity.
Rather I find history to be more synchronous, hence more like a
matrix.