Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge
- Part I Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
- Part II Rethinking Knowledge
- 6 Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality
- 7 Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History
- 8 Rule of Law and the Calling of Dharma: Colonial Encounters, Post-colonial Experiments and Beyond
- 9 Compassion and Confrontation: Dialogic Experiments with Traditions and Pathways to New Futures
- 10 Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations
- 11 The Calling of a New Critical Theory: Self-Development, Inclusion of the Other and Planetary Realizations
- Part III Aspirations and Struggles for Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations
- Afterword
- Advance Praise
7 - Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History
from Part II - Rethinking Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge
- Part I Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
- Part II Rethinking Knowledge
- 6 Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality
- 7 Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History
- 8 Rule of Law and the Calling of Dharma: Colonial Encounters, Post-colonial Experiments and Beyond
- 9 Compassion and Confrontation: Dialogic Experiments with Traditions and Pathways to New Futures
- 10 Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations
- 11 The Calling of a New Critical Theory: Self-Development, Inclusion of the Other and Planetary Realizations
- Part III Aspirations and Struggles for Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations
- Afterword
- Advance Praise
Summary
The inclusion of cyclic time is not a characteristic of cultures which are historically stunted but an indication of historical complexity. this complexity is reflected in the perceptions of the past in pre-modern times, the premises of which were different from the writing of history today.
—Romila Thapar, Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India (1996, 44)Historical consciousness finds itself in an impasse. Historical consciousness seeks its fulfillment in the future, but the internal logic of an economy of profit and growth, unlike a lifestyle of contentment and self-sufficiency, inherently obliges one to mortgage the future.
—Raimundo Panikkar, The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness (1998, 114)Authenticity implies a relation with what is known that duplicates the two sides of historicity: it engages us both as actors and narrators. thus, authenticity cannot reside in attitudes towards a discrete past kept alive through narratives…even in relation to the past our authenticity resides in the struggles of our present. Only in that present can we be true or false to the past we choose to acknowledge.
—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995, 151)The Problem
In his inaugural address at the 61st session of the Indian History Congress at Calcutta, Amartya Sen develops and defends a view of history as an enterprise of knowledge. Sen takes issue with postmodern critiques of knowledge in general and historical knowledge in particular, and argues that though all of us have our own perspectives and points of view, yet it does not preclude the possibility of arriving at “an integrated and coherent picture” (Sen 2001, 86).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Knowledge and Human LiberationTowards Planetary Realizations, pp. 127 - 138Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013