Stage definition

A stage is a delimited division of reality that the human being has made, and that historically -that is, throughout our own time-, societies impose on the functioning of nature in various ways. Thus, the most important function of this category is to enable measurement to objectify nature.

When speaking of Stage as a term in search of a historical definition, rigorously before, one must speak of time. According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, time implies a way of ordering events based on the identification and relationship of the moment in which they occurred, thus establishing a historical position for each one.

For time to exist, it is necessary to divide reality, compute it, building a mental framework that makes it possible to determine point I with respect to II and thus, historically fix, for example, the beginning at point I.

Objectification of time and periodization

If time is a creation of the human as a species, it responds at all times to special characteristics that reflect the particularities, wealth and varieties of a group of people, located in a space and at a given time in the past as a society, and the We can understand the characterization of their way of life as cultural production, which historical science calls the objectification of human life, which includes translating those particularities in time that gave a special seal to the creations of men and women in a specific way. .

In each of the divisions, the forms, styles and contents of the possible sources are searched for to record that moment in the past, since each historical time has a kind of personality that makes it different from others. These temporary differentiators are the input to talk about subcategories emanating from time, such as period, era, stage, conjuncture or moment, which do not necessarily have a specific ascription of duration, that is, we could not affirm that a period is made up of five years if we correspond with the current calendars.

Specifically, a stage would be one of these units of measurement over the passage of that time built by the human being that responds at all times to the criteria of the latter, who acts as the observer of the past, for this reason there are periodizations that sometimes ponder political elements. , other times economic, social, religious, artistic, etc. Periodizing has the purpose of imposing cuts in time, this in a figurative way of course, with the aim of helping the understanding of the processes from said markers that presuppose the beginning or mark the end of a stage.

There are certain trends that guide the delimitation of one time over another, which help to distinguish them in a particular way, since in historical science this is what will help to differentiate the place that one time occupies with respect to another in the succession of events in a series.

The subcategories are marked by the beginning of an event understood as historically important (the founding of Tenochtitlán, the fall of the Inca Empire or the beginning of the Mexican Revolution), whose importance lies not only in the choice of the historian, but also in the transcendence regarding the events after said temporary marker, which will give a special color to that time, characterizing it in a certain way and providing sources that allow verifying the changes as the inauguration of a historical stage.

Stages that classify history

Historicism, one of the traditional views to periodize historical time, proposes two first great stages of the past moment: the prehistoric stage and the historical stage. The first is characterized by the absence of symbols organized as a form of language and its writing, and the second by its appearance. This second stage of History (where it is already written) has in turn several divisions marked by events considered transcendental. These stages are:

classical antiquity: From the appearance of writing to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, marked in the fifth century AD

Middle Ages: the fall of Rome began a period deeply marked by the heyday of the Christian religion throughout almost ten centuries, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in the year 1453.

Modern age: which was born with the great geographical discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries and which ended in the great revolution that occurred in France in 1789.

Contemporary age: It would occupy the temporary space after the French Revolution and the present. However, there are those who consider that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, two centuries later, would be a temporary cut that would put an end to this stage and that from this fact the postmodern world was configured.

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