The View of History as a Prerequisite of the Historical knowledge /part 2/

However, any view of history is objectively put forward, which means that it is not an arbitrary and subjective structure, but rather a construction drawn on the path of the summary of historical practice itself. No matter how dependent on the view of history, historical knowledge is still characterized by a certain autonomy.

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The view of history in this case only serves as the starting point, background, corrective, starting from which each historian builds his knowledge. Knowledge itself, however, contains its own relative independent phases and levels of realization. They reveal the logic of the cognitive process that goes from phenomenon to essence, from empirical to theoretical, from sensory to concrete through abstract to thought-specific, and so on. On this basis, two levels of realization stand out in historical knowledge: empirical and theoretical.

Empirical level of historical knowledge / historical description /. As the subject's interaction with the object, the empirical level of historical knowledge is characterized by the historian's aspiration to reproduce or reconstruct, ideally, the picture of the historical past or of the periods, events or processes studied. It is a knowledge of the phenomenon, unlike the theoretical, which is knowledge of the essence. The main purpose of empirical knowledge is to answer the questions of what, where, when and how it happened. at this level, the historian tries to identify historical processes to restore the researched historical period to the form in which it has actually become. As long as the historical process is invariant, the historian is looking for this one option in which things have been realized.

That is why he works critically with conclusions in the sense: compares them, analyzes them, sifters them, rejects one, accepts others, and so on. Ie. performs one or other logical operations. This, however, does not mean that empirical knowledge has the explanatory moment. On the contrary, all the logical operations at this level are intended not to explain the events yet, but to resurrect them in their authentic form. They are due to the simple fact that in various historical sources there are often opposing and even mutually exclusive testimonies and information. What the empirical level of historical knowledge is captured is the historical description