first person inversion: conscious engagement and the practical past

Argues that the impossible demand for detachment should be replaced with a difficult but more feasible (and ethical) conscious engagement. The lynchpin of this approach is that the historian treat the past as though it were present - selecting for the focal point of this inversion the very locus at which s/he subjectively and existentially feels the past to be closest and most pressing. This is what the author calls 'first person inversion'. By treating this (unpleasant and dangerous) past as present a historian might be able to consciously fall into the past while retaining a kernel of critical consciousness which is lost in submersion constitutive of unconscious engagement.