Existential Ethics and the Philosophy of Historiography: Transgenerational Life and Memory in Literary Culture

What does it mean to bear responsibility for absent others when thinking, reading, and writing about them? The hermeneutic activities of reading and writing often involve ethical relations to absent people who are referred to and spoken about in our present lives. As the human world develops historically through orality and literacy, literary culture is one way in which connections to past and future generations can be deepened. Scrutinizing responsibility in various exhortations to historicize, this book delves into the archaeological idea of prehistory, the anthropology of literacy, the ethics of memory and testimony, the hermeneutics and aesthetics of historical narration, Holocaust histories and the afterlife of evil deeds, the distinction between responsibility and guilt, and the morality of the human sciences. The aim is to clarify a personal and transgenerational responsibility toward absent others. The perspective is an existential ethics inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy.”