The relation between representation and experience: a critical study of the \existentialist philosophy of history\

The concepts of \"representation\" (tropology, emplotment, comprehension, narrative substance) and \"experience\" (subjective & sublime historical, presence) in what can be called the \"existentialist philosophy of history\" require a common ontology so that they can be operationalized: even though they might seem to be hard to reconcile, it is possible to show that the different \"realities\" that they presume are, in fact, different levels of reflexivity of human consciousness acting in a sublime (or non-inherently meaningful) world, in which the unavoidable impermanence of everything implies, along with other factors, the provisional character of every gesture of meaning attribution. Given that every continuity eventually gets undone, it is possible to read the debate as encompassing both sides of the relationship between a higher level of reflexivity and a lower one: thus, the focus on representations highlights the production of continuities in a discontinuous world, while the focus on \"experience\" and \"presence\" emphasizes the discontinuity of the processes, as well as the psychological effects that manifest themselves from the moment on in which it becomes existentially (more than only epistemologically) unsustainable ou undesirable to create meaning through aesthetic resources that presume continuity (such as \"realistic\" ways em emplotment). In our reading of narrativist and experientialist authors, the interaction between different levels of reality (human and otherwise) happens through the movement of the attention between them. Relevant here is the fact that attention can be directed to aspects of the world as well as it can be attracted by them. The text treats the works of Mink, White, and Ankersmit as exemplars of the first case, and of the later Ankersmit and Runia as exemplars of the second. Both traditions (or both parts of the tradition) need a conception of the subject-world relation in which the subject is not presumed to exist apart from the social and natural worlds. (AU)