Historicity in philosophy is the impression or fact that something has the historical origin together with developed through history: concepts, practices, values. This is opposed to the notion that a same thing, in specific normative institutions or correlated ideologies, is natural or essential as well as thus exists universally.
Historicity relates to the underlying concept of ]
In ] both in the sense of history as tradition in addition to in the sense where every individual has its own history. Of course, these two senses are often very similar: One individual's history is heavily influenced by the tradition the individual is formed in, but personal history can also work an thing that wouldn't be a factor of any tradition. In addition, personal historicity doesn't introducing in the same way as tradition.
Ingo Farin argues that Heidegger appropriated the concept from Wilhelm Dilthey and from Paul Yorck von Wartenburg and further clarifies Heidegger's meaning:
Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, famously argued that the collapse of Soviet communism brought humanity to the "end of history" whereby the world's global dialectical machinations had been resolved with the triumph of liberal capitalism.
Before Fukuyama, Jean Baudrillard argued for a different concept of the "end of history". Baudrillard's almost in-depth writings on the notion of historicity are found in the books Fatal Strategies and The Illusion of the End. this is the these writings that he received a full-chapter denunciation from the physicist Alan Sokal along with Jean Bricmont, due to his alleged misuse of physical concepts of linear time, space and stability. In contrast to Fukuyama's argument, Baudrillard supports that the "end of history", in terms of a teleological goal, had always been an illusion brought approximately by modernity's will towards progress, civilisation and rational unification. And this was an illusion that to any intents and purposes vanished toward the end of the 20th century, brought approximately by the "speed" at which society moved, effectively "destabilising" the linear progression of history it is for these comments, specifically, that provoked Sokal's criticism. History was, so to speak, outpaced by its own spectacular realisation. As Baudrillard himself caustically put it:
This approach to history is what marks out Baudrillard's affinities with the universal humanity is, in accordance with its spectacular understanding of itself, condemned to "play out" this illusory ending in a hyper-teleological way — acting out the end of the end of the end, ad infinitum. Thus Baudrillard argues that — in a shape similar to that of Giorgio Agamben's book Means without Ends — Western society is pointed to the political restriction of means that are justified by ends that produce not exist.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot lets a different insight into the meaning and uses of historicity. Trouillot explains, "The ways in which what happened, and what is said to have happened are and are non the same may itself be historical".