라나지트 구하의 헤겔 역사철학 비판

Abstract

Ranajit Guha, a founder of Subaltern Studies Group, deals with Hegel's philosophy of history in his fourth work, History at the Limit of World-History. In early time, his main concern as an subalternist historian was about the elitism of South Asian historiography and politics. In this context, he now argues that Hegel's concept of World-history(Weltgeschite) has come to be synonymous with ‘Reason as the essence of Spirit in History’, and that the colonial thought brought with it has dominated Indian historiographies for a long time. Guha’s critique shows that the concept of World-history, because of its consequent statism, has reduced narrowly the historicality as the true historical existences of men in the world. For this, he discriminates the prose of the world from the prose of history. The former invites all of man’s being in time and his being with others. The latter, that is, another name of Hegel’s World-history, concentrates on the state as the only means of realizing Reason and thus operates as a strategy of containment with its exclusive and selective approach to the past. Guha says that, in India, there had been Itihāsa as a narrative of wonder before the arrival of the Hegelian modern history under British colonial rule. But the battle of narratives resulting in World-history or the prose of history triumphed over Itihāsa or the prose of world. The consequence was that the story as history was dislodged from the people's world and relocated in the state, and so the noise of World-history and its statist concerns has made historiography insensitive to the sighs and whispers of the subaltern’s everyday life. On the basis of Rabindranath Tagore’s comments about the creative insights and plentiful historicality in literature, Guha argues that historicality has not been assimilated to statist concerns in literary representation. He, like Tagore, calls for a creative engagement with the past as a story of man’s being in the everyday world. He insists that this alternative engagement would make it possible for modern historiography to be rescued from its containment in statist World-history.