New Ways Of Thinking Of History: Hayden White, Philosophy Of History

The theme of this dissertation is to illuminate the new way of historical thinking which is reflected in Hayden White. Based on the Marxism historical materialism, the dissertation elaborates the origins of Hayden White's narrative philosophy of history, the implied meaning in his different theoretical phases and the varieties of his moral attitudes. The author tries to analyse and comment them according to the scholarship background as well as the context of text .In the end, the dissertation shows such a point that Hayden White's attempt to reconstruct the criterion of historical knowledge is not successful, because he avoids the historical ontology, especially the law of the real human and the historical development.The narrative philosophy of history is the new theoretical pattern of history operated by White. Facing the dilemma of the philosophy of history since the Hemple's argument, Hayden White tried to rethink the problem"what does the historical thinking mean", and tried to solve the dichotomy between the scientific ontology and the humanism ontology. Using the creation of the linguistic philosophy, especially the theories of the formal structuralism, and melting the analytical philosophy of history and the speculation philosophy of history , Hayden White gives a point that the speciality of history should be thought according to the writing of historiography, and constructs the narrative philosophy of history, which focuses on the textual ontology.The new way of historical thinking appears as different forms in White's academic developing course, that is the pattern of trope interpretation,the pattern of textual reading and the pattern of analyzing narrative strategy, the meaning of which is similar to one another but belongs to different categories.At the early period, Hayden White rethought the speciallity of history according to the rhetorics(tropes).He drew the conclusion that the structure of tropes is lying in the historical works as well as the works of the philosophy of history on the base of his positivist study. He changed the pattern of explaining history into the pattern of trope interpretation. During this period, White treated the historical aesthetics as the independent division of historical thinking. So the history becomes the poetics of history in the vision of Hayden White. With the studying further, White spread the pattern of tropes to the field of culture. History is thought as being cultural, and his rethinking became into criticizing all the cultural phenomena, and the weapon of theory criticizing is the textualist. The criticizing to the Enlightment movement shows the ontology of White's theory belongs to the textualist. However, White's textual position is different from that of the radical textualist. After engaged in studying the narrative, White discovered the narrative form inserted in historian's thinking explicitly or implicitly. The strategy of historical narrative appears as the structure of tropes, and historical narrative is the representation of the past in the form of text. The speciality of history, that is the way of historical thinking, is the narrativity. At last, the theory of cultural criticizing is sublimated into the narrative philosophy of history.In the narrative philosophy of history, Hayden White attempts to reconstruct the criterion of historical knowledge. But the textualist ontology determinates its moral relativism. White also maintains the moral monism in elucidating the modernist event such as Slaughter, so that there are tensions between White's two kinds of positions. The tensions force White to rethink the historical development of the real human, which he tries to avoid in his narrative philosophy of history.The practice of White's researching on the new way of historical thinking shows that the ontology of the philosophy of history could not be avoided, and nor could the truth of history.