“L’humanité de la culture”. Remarques sur la conception normative de l’histoire chez Hermann Cohen

Cohen's conception of history is discussed here in the framework of a reflection upon the normative-practical foundations of historiography. For Cohen, historiography is the most valuable of all sciences, because it is the science in which the fundamental question of the humanity of culture is definitively settled. For him, however, as against the attempt to define the status of the historical sciences on the basis of a separate « logic of values », the status of historiography as a science remains rather problematic. The context which must be transmitted by the historian counts for Cohen as one which is instituted mainly on the basis of the future. The future presents the temporal dimension of « later », and also the transcendental form of the norm. It thus is only in the science of right that Cohen thinks it possible to find the appropriate means for rigorously characterizing the problems which constitute the content of history.