Historical consciousness - Contemporary history and the problem of historical perception

Historical consciousness is an elusive concept, as long as we try to understand it from the narrow perspective of professional historians. Therefore, a wider perspective is needed. If we accept that historical understanding has become a general trait of modern culture, we may try to explain it in terms of general cognitive functions like observation, memory and reflection. The question is however which general theory of observation may account for what historians actually do. This article claims that the theory of second-order observation, developed in the field of cybernetics and systems theory, offers a clear picture of the historian's practice and supersedes the older theory of historicism. The theory applies to all disciplines that observe observing systems including the study of history, which so heavily relies on documents of observers from the past. The concept of second-order observation also throws a new light on other general functions like memory and reflection. The conclusion is that it satisfactorily explains all the characteristics of what is usually meant by 'historical consciousness'