The definitions of history are as many as historians exist. And the substance of history: time, is one of the most complex metaphysical categories to understand, unless we define time within an existential dimension, not free of anguish and also of mystery: "We are time that passes, time that Dies, "and paradoxically: we were born to die.
The foristas
Significant and significant events, worthy of being remembered, make History a relevant discipline and with an evident vocation in favor of Life and in view of its most fundamental challenges and needs. History is basically knowledge of the past and one of its purposes is to give people and social groups wings, through memory and memory, a common identification, and if possible proud, about their origins.
The problem of history is that his speech lacks innocence; And many times the historians, men of flesh and blood, we ended up betrayed by our ideology and interests. The historiographic discourse linked to the State, the Nation and the sectors around the Power is unilateral, Manichaean and manipulative, in essence false. Paradoxically myths and legends end up supplanting historical memories with an earthly meaning. That which was called "collective imaginaries", a mixture of reality and fiction, ends up replacing the rational aspiration to understand the past. Perhaps, as some unsavory authors of History like Borges, Mutis, Golo Mann and many others say: history is the best fiction.
History is basically a philosophical anthropology: a constant reflection on the human task in its most varied manifestations. It is common among historians to confuse truth and objectivity. Truth is not the end of science but the creation of new knowledge. And objectivity is related to the application of the so-called "critical apparatus" in the aforementioned of the most varied documentary sources.
Now, the epicenter of the work of the historian lies in the originality of his thought. The capacity to elaborate critical interpretations that allow the transit on unpublished thematic routes under the imperative of rigor and creative intuition. In the long run the historian is basically a writer who recreates and reinvents the past from a contemporary that inevitably marks and influences him.