Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Dilthey, Unterschied zw Geisteswissenschaften und Naturwissenschaften; Boeckh: Philologie

Kurzinhalt: ...it is the human spirit that constructs the meanings and responds to the motivating values. But what man has constructed man can reconstruct

Textausschnitt: 31/10 At once it follows that there is a profound difference between natural science and historical study. Both the scientist and the historian would understand: the scientist would understand nature; the historian would understand man. But when the scientist understands nature, he is not grasping nature's understanding of itself; for though nature is intelligible, it is not intelligent. But when the historian understands man, his understanding is a recapturing of man's understanding of himself. This recapturing is interpretation. It differs from the understanding that it recaptures, for it makes thematic, puts in words, an understanding that was not thematized but lived. Yet in another fashion it corresponds to what it recaptures; for it envisages an earlier situation and recounts how an individual or group understood that situation and revealed themselves by their understanding of it. (154; Fs) (notabene)
32/10 In Dilthey we have an echo of Vico's claim that it is human affairs that men best understand, for human affairs are the product of human understanding. Again, in Dilthey we have an anticipation of R. G. Collingwood's view that historical knowledge is a reenactment of the past. Finally, we have only to shift our gaze from the interpreter to the persons under scrutiny, to arrive at a phenomenological ontology. The endless variety exhibited in human living has its root in the endless variety of the ways in which people understand themselves, their situation, and the human condition. Such understanding commonly is of the type that spontaneously is generated and spontaneously communicated, the type that may be named com-monsense. It is constitutive of the basic department of human knowledge, the department expressed in ordinary language. Like ordinary language it varies from place to place and from time to time. It enters into the intelligible form man communicates to the products of his ingenuity and his skill. It is part and parcel of human conduct. It is constitutive of the cognitional and the moral reality that makes man the 'symbolic animal' of the historians and the 'self-completing animal' of the sociologists. (154; Fs)
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33/10 Let us now revert to August Boeckh's definition of philology as the interpretative reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit. The constructions of the human spirit are man and his world: for his world is a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value; and it is the human spirit that constructs the meanings and responds to the motivating values. But what man has constructed man can reconstruct. What man has responded to in thought and word and deed, he can respond to once more if only in thought and word and feeling. Such reconstructing and such responding-to-once-more are the interpretations of the scholar and the narratives of the historian. (154f; Fs)
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34/10 We may conclude this section by noting that historical studies, so conceived, have all the marks of a distinct specialization. Like natural science history is empirical, but where the sciences seek universal principles, laws, structures, seriations, history would understand particular words, deeds, situations, movements. Where the several sciences each construct their own technical languages, historians as an ongoing group are confronted with the task of deciphering and learning all the languages of mankind whether still living or though long since dead. Where the sciences come to know parts or aspects of the universe that common sense never would discover, historians enlarge their own common sense to the point where it encapsulates something of the common sense of other places and times. Lastly, as other specializations, so the study of history leads to the formation of a professional group that develops its own proper procedures and traditions, enforces an initiation ritual of doctoral studies, meets in its own annual congresses, and stocks special libraries with its reference works, surveys, journals, and monographs. (155; Fs)