Ideas, conceptos, metáforas. La tradición alemana de historia intelectual y el complejo entramado del lenguaje

Abstract

In recent years the prevalence of so-called «new intellectual history» caused contempt of the old school about history of ideas based on the assumption of their unhistorical method of analysis (their view of ideas as eternal entities). This argument is, in fact, somewhat simplistic, thus losing sight of the true sense of the profound changes produced in this field. It isn’t true that history of ideas ignore the fact that the meaning of the ideas change over time. The real point at issue is not it, how ideas change (a mere description of a series of semantic shifts produced in a given period), but, rather, why they do it. The study of the German tradition of intellectual history in this paper serves as a basis to illustrate the meaning and consequences of displacement of the core ideas of the objects in the discipline. As shown here in his attempt to account for the origin of conceptual formations contingency opens our horizons to the complex nature of the ways we invest significantly our world. We discover the plurality of layers of symbolic reality existing beneath the surface of ideas as well as its nature and differential functions. And the reasons for its ultimate failure to do so, why this universe never fails to make his vocation to constitute itself as a fully self-contained and rationally integrated, contingency driving out of their field. In short, why historicity is not something that comes to intellectual history from outside it (a byproduct of social history or the result of the action of an external agent), as assumed in the history of ideas, but a constitutive dimension of it.