Historical narrative and enrichment of the meaningful horizon of cultural worlds

1 Introduction

A comprehension of the diversity of phenomena and the relations between them is always given to the human subject against the background of the horizon of the cultural world that he/she shares with other people. Reality is perceived by him/her as originally belonging to a world that has the characteristics of spatial and temporal certainty and is articulated through language. The sensory-figurative side of the phenomena of the world is constantly mediated by rational schemes and tends towards conceptual formalization and the acquisition of symbolic expression. The various languages of our cultural worlds give reality an intersubjectively graspable outline. They have the constancy of the present state, but at the same time they tend to change. Their horizon is never finalized, because it presupposes the constant desire of the subjects who share it to understand the phenomena and the relations known to them in a new way in an integral semantic perspective that looms in the present and is open to the future, in the light of events that intrude into the familiar, and this perspective is often perceived as an unshakable order of things. The world in which people live cannot be understood outside of the flow of time that passes through their lives and determines their destinies, filled with unforeseen events. Subjects belonging to a certain cultural world are doomed to modify its narrative outlines, responding to the challenge of events via communication. Interpreting the world, they must also change the image of their own “I” in dialogue with their contemporaries and with the tradition of the past. Therefore, the narration of history is the most important tool for the transformation of the semantic content of cultural worlds via communication. This article considers the role of historical narrative in enriching the semantic and pragmatic horizon of cultural worlds. The objective of the article can be expressed in the following tasks.

The first task consists in reaching a theoretical understanding of the specifics of cultural world constitution in its spatial and temporal boundaries, clarifying the semiotic basis of this process. This implies the need for increased attention to uncover the foundations of cultural world formation in the perspective of an interdisciplinary synthesis of philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, cultural history and other branches of the humanities. This kind of reflexive synthesis should provide the opportunity for a deeper understanding of cultural world creation as a semiotic integrity embodied in a basic vocabulary that is subjected to unlimited enrichment via the pragmatics of communication.

The second significant task of the article is to consider the linguistic-semiotic structure of narrative as allowing, on the basis of unlimited semiosis, the process of saturating the cultural world in the diachronic dimension with the heritage of tradition. In this regard, a cultural world appears as an integrity in its chronotopic structure, which makes it possible to demonstrate the inseparability of the connection between the past and the present, pulsating in the communicative interaction of subjects who constantly update its basic vocabulary.

Addressing the topic of an event that triggers the transformation of synchronous-diachronic relations of the cultural world as a semiotic unity is the third task of the article. The nomination of an event and its introduction into the integrity of the cultural world will be considered as the beginning of a continuous updating of the basic vocabulary of culture, including changes in its immanent state and external contacts. Thus, the constancy of the revision of the inherent horizon of the worldview is ensured.

The fourth task of the article is a consistent justification of the need to synthesize the theoretical and methodological tools of hermeneutics, semiotics and analytical philosophy in order to obtain a contemporary vision of the problem of historical narrative.

2 The world of culture as a dynamic semantic unity

The panorama of history is formed on the basis of the diversity of cultural worlds that actually exist today or, having existed for a certain time, have gone into oblivion. The very non-existence of past cultural worlds looks relative, since, having lost their actual existence, they can still influence existing cultures. Cultural worlds are given to each of their inhabitants as integral semantic ensembles that are interconnected with other cultural formations through diverse dialogical relations in synchrony and diachrony. They are the result of collective experience and praxis, objectified in a variety of intersubjectively fixed ways of interaction between people, embodied in stereotypes of human activity, values and norms, as well as in dissimilar forms of reproducing the picture of reality, and fixed in various types of language games. Ordinary language is the source material on the basis of which a continuum of cultural forms rises from myth and religion to art, history, science and philosophy. Objective forms of culture exist relatively independently of the inhabitants of cultural worlds, although they are unthinkable outside of the subjects who share them and are potentially capable of their transformation and of corrections in their semantic content. They are the result of a rational “processing” of historical experience, the bearers of which are collective communities and individual subjects who take the liberty to express their attitude to phenomena manifested within cultural worlds, changing their semantic content. The very existence of a particular cultural world as a certain spiritual and semantic integrity has as its opposite pole the reflexive activity of an individual subject capable of asking questions about the meaning of certain phenomena within or outside of it.

The presence of cultural worlds endowed with inner meaning does not at all give grounds for the creation of universalist constructions of history, reducing their real existence to the self-disclosure in time of a single substance possessing immanent logic. The broad movement of a “critique of historical reason” initiated by Dilthey and continued by representatives of not only philosophy of life, but also neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, existential hermeneutics, analytical philosophy, neo-Marxism, post-structuralism, and other schools of post-classical philosophy, called into question the very possibility of creating universalist schemes of cultural development, most significantly represented by the views of Hegel and Marx. However, the fiasco of this type of classical substantialist schemes of cultural development does not mean, as Dilthey rightly pointed out, that the attempt to find an understanding of its open integrity should be abandoned altogether. Although the human subject is not able to achieve the status of an “absolute observer” who could rise above the situation of his/her “engagement” in a particular cultural world in its spatial-temporal and linguistic-semiotic determinacy, he/she is permanently trying to reflexively understand and give meaning to the integrity of history, in the flow of which he/she resides.

Staying within the boundaries of a certain world, nominating the realities that he/she encounters in language and expressing his/her attitude towards them, the subject simultaneously correlates his/her cultural world with other worlds. This kind of action not only leads to the consideration of specific realities of the world, but also to a reflexive “revision” and “redefinition” of this cultural world as such and, consequently, to a change in attitude towards it and the transformation of the subject’s view of himself/herself, to a change in self-understanding and self-identification. It has as its result in the field of linguistic-semiotic expression that “unlimited semiosis,” the essence of which is discussed by prominent theorists from Peirce to Eco.

Debating the immanent way of transforming the semantic horizon of the cultural world, theorists of semiotics pay tribute to Kant’s heritage that makes it possible to substantiate the doctrine of “unlimited semiosis.” Although Kant significantly underestimated the role of signs and symbolic means and the ineradicable historicity of the subject in the constitution of the fabric of culture, within the boundaries of the project of creating a transcendentally grounded metaphysics, he discovered the a priori foundations of the creative ability of human consciousness to constantly enrich its views about individual phenomena in the world and its meaningful integrity. Already in the Critique of Pure Reason, he discovers the existence of a mechanism of productive imagination, the schematism of the intellect (Verstand), which allows for the rationalization of the flow of experience, demonstrated the complementarity of the intellect’s ability of judgment with reason (Vernunft), requiring that the sum of our knowledge “should constitute a system,” an integral vision of the meaningful content of the world (Kant 2016a: 455). These Kantian reflections found their culmination in the Critique of Judgment.

In this latter work, Kant outlined a program for the dynamics of the relationship between experience and the reflective faculty of judgment, further developed his theory of productive imagination and his idea of the primacy of the semantic activity of reason in relation to intellect’s operations. The reflective ability of judgment comes to the forefront of theoretical analysis, designed to demonstrate the gift of the intellect to constantly coin new conceptual forms based on productive imagination, with the intellectual schemes accompanying them having the potential to generalize continuously transforming experience (Kant 2016b: 771–772). Experience was described by Kant as the result of a synthesis of sensually given and conceptual components. The reflective faculty of judgment is aimed at particular phenomena of experience and their summing up under newly constructed concepts. This ability constitutes its difference from the defining faculty of judgment, which correlates the particular with already existing concepts. At the same time, the images of reproducible particulars, just like the newly constructed concept, as Kant rightly emphasized, are formed on the basis of productive imagination. The reflective judgment, in his opinion, is addressed to a certain intersubjective community capable of accepting its verdict. The whole course of Kant’s argumentation about the role of the faculty of judgment is summarized in the statement that reason, rising above the mechanical vision of reality, comes to comprehend the world as a whole in the perspective of affirming the objective teleology of nature and, thereby, stimulates the ability of judgment to penetrate into deeper levels of the phenomenally accessible world (Kant 2016b: 821). Of course, Kant “naturalizes” the comprehended world, but he simultaneously reveals the source of the meaning-producing activity of the faculty of judgment.

The development of the ideas proposed by Kant about the creation of an intersubjectively shared and constantly enriched semantic unity of worlds went further along the line of searching for the source of their historicity and the ways of their embodiment in the field of language. It is in this direction that representatives of post-classical philosophy have focused their efforts to develop an understanding of the specifics of cultural worlds.

In non-classical philosophy, under the influence of Kantian thought, there is a clear tendency to realize the role of the symbolic foundations of the worlds of culture. In this direction, the development of the basic principles of semiotics on the platform of Peirce’s pragmatism played a special role. His thought laid the foundation for the theory of “unlimited semiosis,” demonstrating the immanent mechanism of growth in the symbolic layer of cultural worlds. In Principles of Philosophy, Peirce admitted that his understanding of the nature and tasks of pragmatism owed much to mastering the philosophical content of the Critique of Pure Reason (CP 1.20). However, remaining a supporter of the transcendentalist attitude, Peirce rejected what he considered the dogmatic side of Kant’s philosophy, and, above all, the doctrine of the “thing in itself,” creating a pragmatist version of the doctrine of the method of the sign-symbolic constitution of an intersubjectively significant world mediated by individual and collective life experience. Creating semiotics within the boundaries of a pragmatist worldview, he understood its tasks as inseparable from the reflection of the logical-epistemological a priori constants of human thought and action. He worked out in detail the movement from the field of intuitively fixed data to the sphere of referentially mediated knowledge, studied the mechanism of conceptual thinking on the basis of schemes that accompany productive imagination, demonstrated the role of various types of signs providing logical operations and an intersubjective understanding of the world through communication (CP 1.36).

Peirce clearly understood that “unlimited semiosis” takes place in a socio-historical context, is influenced by it and has the reciprocal effect on it. However, he did not seek to make a semiotic strategy a tool for comprehending the constitution n of cultural worlds in the dynamics of history. This task was put on the agenda thanks to the efforts of his followers, who linked the transformation of language with the process of cultural development, its diversity and typological characteristics. In this regard, the example of the post-structuralist interpretation of the “unlimited semiosis” by; Eco (2000: 12–15) is indicative. Eco (1984: 4) proposed an original way of understanding the constitution of various cultural worlds, based on a synthesis of the ideas of Peirce’s semiotics with the Kantian heritage, as well with linguistic philosophy, hermeneutics and post-structuralism.

The historicist-oriented doctrines, which also learned the lessons of Kant’s thought, can be distinguished as another significant trend in the formation of theoretical ideas about cultural worlds. A significant step in this direction was made by the efforts of supporters of the philosophy of life and existential hermeneutics. Dilthey, who became the founder of the strategy of a “critique of historical reason,” accused Kant of forgetting “time and life” and made the main thrust of his theoretical constructions the presence of the subject in time, which forms the basis for experiencing and comprehending the semantic content of the inexorable stream of historical events. He develops his own version of the transcendental reflection of the mental content of consciousness and builds on this basis the foundations of his own hermeneutical doctrine. Based on the results of Kant’s analysis of the dynamics of cognition, summarized in the Critique of Judgment, he demonstrates that the experience possessed by the subject is the result of his/her stay in the time of history, which is inseparable from language, the sign-symbolic way of its expression (Dilthey 1996: 238). The activity of the intellect, the ability of judgment, as well as the content of historical experience, in his opinion, is prompted in the final instance by a time-situated reason seeking to see the integral meaning of the formation of the relationship between the past and the present, to place particular fragments of what happened in the frame of the meaningful integrity of history. The main stages of a hermeneutical comprehension of the realities of the cultural world and its connection with other worlds are represented by experience, expression and understanding. These hermeneutical operations are depicted by Dilthey as inseparable from the linguistic form of their existence.

Starting from the ideas of Kant, Husserl, and the constructions of Dilthey and von Wartenburg, Heidegger went on to build his own version of the metaphysics of finiteness (Heidegger 1986: 397–404). The fundamental ontology created by him on the basis of phenomenology assumed the principal insubstantiality of human existence in time, through the prism of which the realities of the world are portrayed. Thus, Dilthey’s ideas received an ontological justification. A human being appeared as a bearer of history and the experience of its comprehension, on the basis of which his/her relationships with other people and the world in which he/she lives are constituted. Understanding and a semantic interpretation of the world against the background of the horizon of language appeared as existential constants of human existence. These themes, preserved in a modified form in the late period of Heidegger’s work, largely set the further path of development of philosophical hermeneutics up to the present day.

In the writings of Gadamer, Ricœur, Arendt, Vattimo, and other theorists of hermeneutics, the problem of the constitution of cultural worlds has received a multi-vector development. If Heidegger, relying in his work Kant and the Problem of metaphysics on the doctrine of the productive imagination of the author of the Critique of Pure Reason, came to the idea of Dasein’s free self-determination as a source of cultural creativity, the thinkers of the hermeneutic constellation developed further his understanding in the perspective of working out the provisions they found in the Critique of Judgment (Ruthrof 2023: XI). They revealed the connection of the phenomenon of imagination, which expands the field of Dasein’s hermeneutic experience, with a language that accumulates tradition and creates an intersubjectively significant content of the human world, and they uncovered the unity of operations of the reflective ability of judgment to comprehend particular phenomena with a global sense-setting rooted in the activity of reason. Of particular importance is the theme of reflexivity and dialogue, not only in the realization of understanding in the world of a definite culture, but also in the process of interaction between different cultural worlds and in the translation and dissemination of meanings born within their boundaries. Drawing attention to this point, Ricœur wrote that hermeneutics cannot remain neutral in relation to the achievements of semiotics (Ricœur 1982: 163). The use of its resources turns out to be a necessary link in understanding the semantic content of cultural worlds in the context of history.

3 The historical narrative and the challenge of the event: enriching the horizon of the cultural world via communication

The semantic content of the cultural world is transformed under the influence of the various ways of cognizing and representing its phenomena, which affect people’s attitude to the realities of the natural and social order, a set of multifaceted intersubjective connections and communicative practices that produce these realities. The main types of knowledge and representation of the world can be distinguished according to their subject matter and method of cognition, which are fixed in discursive strategies. It is obvious that the world, which becomes a field of cognition and representation in a certain language, has synchronous and diachronic dimensions. Mink reasonably believed that in an extremely generalized form, the main types of cognitive activity can be divided into (1) the concrete study in scientific-theoretical terms of some specific subject matter of interest to a scholar; (2) a categorical comprehension of the world in philosophical and ideological terms; (3) narration of what happened in time (Mink 1987: 35–41). In the latter case, we are dealing with a narrative, a story about what happened in the reality of history or in the imaginary course of events, which is assumed by an artwork.

The narrative is related to the way a person exists in the flow of time and to his/her desire to give a meaning to his/her life in the context of tradition. It is necessary for the acquisition of personal and collective identity. That is why the narrative, which is always associated with remaining in a certain situation of time and place, playing the role of a kind of mediator between the moment of the present, looking into the future, and the trail of the tradition of the past, turns out to be an important tool for gaining the semantic content of cultural worlds and their enrichment via communicative pragmatics (Fisher 2021: 19). As a special manner of comprehension and expression in the language of the cultural world, the narrative appears in an incessant dialogue of subjects who reflexively formulate their own attitude to tradition, inseparable from the flow of event formation. Cultural worlds are not monadically closed, because the narrative that constitutes their identity also implies an appeal to other worlds and the traditions correlative to them, the content of which must be translated and comprehended in its otherness and significance for us.

The basic features of the narrative are intensively discussed by representatives of various trends in contemporary post-classical thought. The linguistic turn initiated the emergence of an abundance of narrative interpretations developed by adherents of analytical philosophy. Among them are theorists who build their own vision of narrative in the spirit of a synthesis of linguistic philosophy with the ideas of pragmatism and neo-pragmatism (Danto, M. White, Ankersmit, etc.), as well as those who seek to link the legacy of Wittgenstein with the heritage of Collingwood (Dray, Mink, H. White, and others). Both groups of theorists offer quite interesting and productive views on the nature of narrative in history and literature. They are also willing to understand the internal logic and resources of other views on the distinctive features of narrative, in particular, the ideas of the hermeneutic philosophy of narration (Gadamer, Riсœur, Bubner, etc.). There is even a tendency to recognize mutual achievements in this area. In this regard, Ricœur’s appeal to the analytical version of the historical narrative interpretation and the acceptance of an existential hermeneutical approach in its understanding by Danto and H. White may serve as good examples.

The narrative in its historical and literary versions is always based on the description of what happened to an individual character or a collective community, presenting the chain of events unfolding in space and time. It is always marked, according to Bakhtin’s fair conclusion, by the presence of a “chronotope,” a space-time form of ordering events within the limits of the narrative integrity constructed by the author (Bakhtin 2012: 220–221). Both historical and fictional types of narration are the outcome of the author’s thought efforts and the work of the productive imagination, but the tasks that arise in these two versions of the representation of events occurring in time are different. By appealing to fantasy, the writer creates a chain of stories about events that take place in a fictional world with images of heroes created by him/her, although it is possible that he/she will place them in the quite realistically described circumstances of a specific period of the past recognizable to readers, and even force them to meet with historical figures of that time. It is enough to recall in this connection Eco’s novels The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum or The Prague Cemetery, which, for all the adventurousness of their plots, unfold in precisely verified circumstances of the periods of history he draws upon. Another thing are historical studies, which always carry the claims of their authors to reproduce “what happened” despite the fact that the realities of past eras do not exist in the present and are reconstructed by the creative efforts of professional researchers.

History, as Croce noted, always carries a reading of the past in the light of the present. This thought motivated Collingwood in rejecting the story of “scissors and glue” and asserting the importance of “a priori imagination” in the writing of history, in the light of which what happened in the past is “played out” by the historian in rational reconstruction as an answer to a question posed in the present. Collingwood’s approach was adopted by Gadamer, thus becoming a part of his vision of history as an ‘effective history’ (Wirkungsgeschichte). In developing his hermeneutical strategy, Gadamer proposed a vision of the historian’s involvement in the stream of tradition he/she is experiencing, which encourages him/her to pose questions that can initiate a narrative about the past. Entering into a dialogue with his/her contemporaries, the historian finds himself/herself at the same time at the mercy of the questioning that comes from people who created the tradition in the past. In many ways, an approach akin to his views can be traced among representatives of the Collingwoodian wing of the analytical philosophy of history.

It is the thought of the historian that motivates the initial selection of the material of the events of the past according to their belonging to certain chronological stages in order to create a narrative filled with meaning. Croce, as is well known, believed that the chronicle is neutral and does not imply the engagement or interest of the historian in its creation, which distinguishes it from the historical narrative (Croce 1949: 301–306). However, already at the stage of chronicle production, as White (2002: 94) and other followers of the analytical tradition rightly noted, selectivity is manifested in the approach of the author aimed at finding its final expression in the narrative form. A completed historical narrative always has an integral “chronotope,” in the format of which events are placed, that is connected by the unity of the narrative outline, making its text a meaningful whole.

The integrity of the narrative and the ordering of its events within the space-time boundaries are always set by the position of the author, who combines the present and the past. The writer ensures the unity of the plot and the storyline of his/her work. Like the author of a literary narrative, the historian, having set the problem as the starting point of his/her research, must also think about the main storyline of his/her narrative. This suggests his/her concern with the way of expressing the problem of narration, ranking facts reconstructed from sources and capturing events in language in order to obtain the effect of reproducing a picture of what happened in the text. After all, the “pictorial” effect, as Wittgenstein emphasized, is an indispensable companion of the nomination of an event in language. The narrative is intended to “portray” the chain of events that happened in the perspective chosen by its author. At the same time, the historian, like the writer, tries to arouse the reader’s interest in the outline of the unfolding events in the narrative. The presence of a well-thought-out intrigue in the context of the narrative, according to Mink, testifies to the skill of not only the writer, but also the historian.

Both the writer and the historian develop the compositional structure of their works in detail. Of course, the writer is not at all constrained by the task of sequentially or chronologically reproducing the events that are conditioned by the plot and the storyline of the work. He/she can freely travel with the reader in time and space, without restricting the flight of his/her productive imagination through academic limits. In this regard, the historian who creates the narrative is limited by the canons of academic practice, the reproduction of his/her vision of processes that are documented and based on reliable sources and factual data. At the same time, of course, considerations of the rigor of the composition of his/her work should not completely devalue the possibilities of his/her imagination to create vivid images of the past.

The historical narrative is based on facts of varying degrees of generality, which, as the work of representatives of the analytical philosophy of history has shown, for all their specificity, are fundamentally verifiable, based on the material of available sources. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the fair conclusion of Danto, who stated that the narrative description of the facts of history differs significantly from the approach of the natural sciences in that it contains a reference not only to a certain event, but also implies its inclusion in the subsequent chain of events up to the present (Danto 1985: 169). Thus, for example, naming 1618 as the date of the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, the author of such a factual statement formulates a sentence that contains knowledge about the subsequent course of events. Nevertheless, despite all the difference between historical sentences of the factual order, they may well be empirically confirmed or refuted when referring to data reconstructed on the basis of sources.

The situation changes significantly when the question arises about the truth or falsity of integral narrative texts. Regarding them, as the authors of epistemological studies representative of analytical thought reasonably assert, we can only talk about their greater or lesser reliability. It is evident that when constructing a narrative, the author selects sources and facts on the basis of which an implicitly or explicitly formulated system of diverse individualized explanations of what happened, correlative to them, is built. The historian does not have absolute knowledge of everything that happened and always talks about the chains of events that he/she considers significant in the light of his/her own preferences. This implies the fundamental incompleteness of any narratives about the past, the possibility of their constant correction in the perspective of the openness of history and the experience capturing it.

A reliable historical narrative always has the characteristic of a consistency of all its parts with the integral order of its construction, a peculiar coherence of the parts within a framework of semantic unity. This kind of effect is achieved because the narrative is organized in the perspective of an author’s unified vision of a selected chain of events of the past (White 2014: 103). It is obvious that this moment creates a problem when an attempt is made to combine the stories of different authors about the same events that aroused their interest. After all, these authors can radically differ from each other in their axiological and ideological priorities, which significantly affect the way they view the events of the past and the choice of which are the most significant among them. The contradictions that arise among narrative representations of the connection between the past and the present necessarily lead to a consideration of the topic of a correspondence of stories about various historical processes with a panoramic view of the history of mankind on a philosophical level.

Various versions of the “critique of historical reason” are associated with the refutation of a speculative interpretation of history which claimed to find a single substance of socio-cultural development that would be revealing its orientation and global meaning. Along with the assertion of such an attitude to the problem of a global comprehension of the meaning of history, attempts are also being made to prove that the speculative moment cannot be completely eliminated within the boundaries of a critical attitude to history. Croce believed that philosophizing is dead without an understanding of history, and history turns into a fruitless activity without giving philosophical meaning to the events taking place in its stream (Croce 1949: 269–270). His follower Collingwood declared the importance of the “idea of history,” which is irreducible from the fabric of historical reflection and endows individual parts of the chain of events of the past with semantic certainty in relation to its integral meaning understood in the light of the present (Collingwood 1994: 247). This approach is shared and developed in different ways by contemporary authors who assert the need to “resurrect” the speculative philosophy of history within the analytical tradition (Kellner 1995: 18). Turning to the discussion of this topic in a contemporary context indicates that the narrative of any segment of history presupposes, in order to gain meaning, the attribution to a certain integral picture of universal history. The critical “resurrection” of meta-narratives as intersubjectively significant constructions in the “post-metaphysical era” (Habermas) suggests that the very possibility of interpreting the meaning of the diachronic transformation of cultural worlds is impossible without the birth of new stories about their past, which require reference to the open integrity of universal history portrayed on the basis of intra-cultural and intercultural dialogue.

Historical narrative, which contributes in many ways to diachronic transformation and semantic enrichment in the process of the self-description of cultural worlds, is unthinkable without encountering unforeseen events that intrude into the context of the contemporary situation. The event can significantly change our vision of the present, of the traditions of the past, and prospects for the future. It can transform the existing cultural world and its relationship with other worlds. Under its influence, the creation of a previously non-existent, new cultural world can become real. Due to its unpredictability, the event conceals not only a significant potential for positive creation, but also the possibility of tragic and destructive consequences. It may turn out to be an irrational force in relation to the existing order of things. For this reason, the impact of an event on the destiny of cultural worlds is becoming an intensely debated topic, attracting the attention of representatives of dissimilar theoretical strategies.

In Heidegger’s (1986: 379) fundamental ontology, an event is considered as the realization of being in time, its manifestation in its rapid course. In the initial period of his activity, an event is approached as invading the world of Dasein in the flow of time, while the later Heidegger slightly modifies his views and speaks of history as an eventful formation of being, preceding any attempt to understand and interpret the meaning of the past. Heidegger’s opponents often accuse him of paying no attention to the alternative nature of the event in relation to the existing order of things. Levinas (1969: 46–47) vividly wrote about his “totalizing” vision of the world, which does not know the inexpressible infinity and the other eventfully generated by it. His thought largely stimulated Derrida’s deconstructivist views on the diversity of principles underlying the organization of cultural worlds which are not reducible to a single logic. For him, the event is associated with a speech act expressing an attitude towards the other, suggesting trust and recognition of this irreducible otherness under the sign of the presence in the human experience of the “messianic” beginning of infinity. The event is irreducible to the existing order of things and can serve as the basis for a new worldview. Derrida speaks of the “shuttle” of our thinking as a response to the challenge of eventfulness (Derrida 2002: 12). In a certain sense, his approach looks like a response to Gadamer (1977: 53). Gadamer, Derrida believes, considers the event as an incentive for dialogue and translation within the existing world order, underestimating its challenge that carries the message of the “messianic” beginning of the ineffable infinity that provokes negotiations with the other. Ankersmit, however, in his theory of “sublime historical experience,” without due justification reproaches not only Gadamer, but also Derrida for underestimating the role of an event that, in his opinion, can completely change the view of history and lead to a different narrative that changes the self-description of the cultural world (Ankersmit and Menezes 2017: 247–273). Perhaps an even more radical view of the subject is offered by Badiou (2005: 179), for whom the event comes from nothing and can serve as the basis of a new world, its system creation. Thus, in his opinion, alternative and incommensurable cultural worlds arise, each built on its own logic. Simon (2019: 146) says in this regard that his approach is most relevant to the contemporary situation when history is born in the horizon of the future.

Whether an event arises within a particular cultural world or is addressed to it from the outside, it comes in the form of a challenge to the existing semantic integrity, or it calls for the emergence of an absolutely new one. In the second case, the event becomes the central link in the formation of its own unity, organizing its individual fragments around itself. In the light of the event, the subjects will either maintain the existing semantic unity of the world or create it anew. In the former case, they will turn to a re-description of the event in the existing dictionary, while in the latter, they will try to create a new dictionary for the nomination of a new world. This work is being carried out with the aim of giving the world meaning in its synchronous and diachronic dimensions. Narrative thinking practices are responsible for organizing the tradition of a cultural world, which sets its diachronic depth. Since the onslaught of events never ends within the boundaries of actually existing worlds, the subjects who create them constantly change their ideas about the phenomena that fill them, they change the ways of their symbolic representation, seek their recognition by the community and accordingly modify their own practices of organizing multilevel intersubjective connections and interaction with reality.

4 Conclusions

The world of culture is the result of constructing its meaningful content on the basis of unlimited semiosis. In studying this process, a methodological synthesis of approaches proposed in semiotics, hermeneutics and analytical philosophy may prove to be highly effective. The foundations for an understanding of the a priori mechanism making up the multidimensional human world were proposed by Kant, who showed that the openness of experience, intellectual activity based on productive imagination, and the determinative and reflective ability of judgment are ultimately set in motion by the constant meaning-creating impulse of reason. Thus, the human world appeared as a sphere of the creation of cultural meanings. Kant’s ideas inspired the search for the mechanism of unlimited semiosis underlying the world of culture from Peirce to Eco. The nomination of the world of culture in language, which serves as a tool for creating an intersubjectively significant and constantly enriched picture of the universe of meanings, is interpreted within the boundaries of semiotics and linguistics as inseparable from the activity of productive imagination, the schematism of reason, and practical activity. In a contemporary perspective, unlimited semiosis is approached as a constant enrichment of the sign-semantic field that presupposes at the same time an awareness of the fact that the person creating the cultural world is a fundamentally historical subject. The dictionary, which portrays the cultural world in a symbolic form, nominates the realities that are present in the synchrony of experience, and at the same time refers to the background of tradition. This fact was discovered in the format of hermeneutics and predetermined the productivity of its alliance with the theory of semiotics in the contemporary context.

Narrativity is the most important characteristic of the constitution of the cultural world in its diachronic dimension via communication. It complements the linguistic picture of the cultural world at the level of synchronicity, bringing it into the area of a rootedness in the past. The historical narrative as a specific way of creating a diachronic description of the cultural world is fruitfully studied today in the unity of its ontological foundations, epistemological, semiotic and linguistic characteristics on the cooperative basis of hermeneutics and semiotics with analytical philosophy. Since history is determined by the specific mode of human existence in time and space, marked by finiteness and uniqueness, the human subject tends to talk about it. What is happening in history is expressed in the form of a story that captures a person’s thoughts about a certain chain of events in the flow of time, addressed to a potential listener and reader. This can take the form of both an artistic and a specialized historical narrative, making in each case a decisive contribution to the constitution of the cultural world. The ability to judge what happened in the past through the horizon of its discursive representation in the present on the basis of imagination serves to achieve a reflexive self-identity of the person. No less is it necessary for cultural communities to gain their self-identity. They enter into a reflective dialogue with other cultural worlds and inevitably come to the task of understanding their own uniqueness and destiny against the background of a picture of the historical path of mankind.

Historical narration is subordinated to the general linguistic and semiotic rules of describing the events of the past. It should have integrity, thematic and plot certainty, problematic character, temporal and spatial organization within the boundaries of the chronotope system chosen by the author, as well as an efficient intrigue and composition focused on the intended reader who is able to decode its content. At the same time, the historical narrative, unlike the literary one, should be based on truthful and reliable empirical data, despite the fact that its linguistic description always assumes a connection between the past and the present. Historical narratives on their own, from the point of view of their epistemological status, have only greater or lesser reliability, since they depend on the interpretative intentions of their authors. The narrative creator is always an inhabitant of a particular cultural world at the current stage of its evolution, and the questions that he/she formulates today summarize his/her experience of a certain situation of a unity of past and present in the horizon of the future, the corresponding historical experience, represented in the dictionary of his/her era. Simultaneously, he/she always makes the experienced situation problematic in the perspective of specific events, which he/she resurrects in his/her imagination, reconstructs and represents in language, placing them in the integral panorama of history presented by him/her. Thus, by definition, he/she is a being who thinks of himself/herself in the diachrony of the coexistence of “numerous worlds.” A deconstruction of the meanings of other worlds and dialogical communication with them are integral parts of his/her professional efforts. Judging by specific events, he/she expands in diachrony the semantic horizon of the worldview of his/her own culture.

The intrusion of an unforeseen event requires a reaction within the boundaries of the cultural world and can initiate changes in its self-description, as well as in the relations that develop between it and other cultures. It is capable of provoking a change in the picture of the world, its semantic coloring in the diachronic and synchronous dimensions, seriously transforming mental and value attitudes and the ways of life within the boundaries of a certain culture. The event is perceived by the inhabitants of the cultural world in a dialogical mode, forcing the subjects involved in it not only to nominate what happened, but also to reflexively re-describe and evaluate themselves, other people, and the objective realities of the world. It can come from outside, from the area of another cultural world, or it may occur within a given culture; it can belong to the present or the past. Things, natural factors, or the results of individual and collective activity – human actions, thoughts, speech acts, etc. – can all appear as performing the role of an event. Not only economic or socio-political upheavals, military conflicts and revolutions, but also scientific discoveries, technical innovations, new kinds of artistic worldview, practices of everyday life and speech, etc. may require a serious change in the Encyclopedic description of the world. The pragmatics of language use, the standards of communication, interaction, and intersubjective relations are directly related to these processes of unlimited semiosis. New systems and methods of communication give rise to previously non-existent standards for their reading and interpretation and for further uses of speech in various situational circumstances of dissimilar cultural worlds.