Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Titel: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Stichwort: Fachgeschichte (technical history; Relativismus (Huizinga); Bultmann (Verständnis, Vorverständnis)

Kurzinhalt: Huizinga, and his definition was that history is a people interpreting to itself its past ... Bultmann ... The historian's view of human nature, of human destiny, plays a fundamental role in the selection ...

Textausschnitt: 59a A second view is relativism. Now that is an extremely large doctrine. I will just take a single and rather simple example of it, using one of the set of papers in a Festschrift presented to Ernst Cassirer on his sixtieth birthday, about 1936, with the title Philosophy and History.1 If I remember rightly, the first essay was by Johan Huizinga,2 and his definition was that history is a people interpreting to itself its past. But the people of today who do the interpreting are not the people who did the interpreting fifty years ago, and they have quite a different slant on things. A lot of water has gone under the bridge, and consequently the interpretation of the past in the present history is not the interpretation of the past of fifty years ago, and much less of a hundred years ago, and so on. There are several histories. This relativism can come out in many ways. You can have the English history of England, the French history of England, the German history of England, and the three are not exactly the same; and similarly, you can have several other combinations. The possibility of that arises insofar as history is not simply the strict technical history, insofar as it fills in the blanks or holes, or leans rather heavily on qualities and probabilities that depend a good deal upon the subject who is writing the history. (Fs)

59b A third view comes out in Rudolph Bultmann. He distinguishes between understanding and preunderstanding, Verständnis and Vorverständnis.1 The understanding, the Verständnis, is this interlocking of the data (although he expresses himself somewhat differently). But the preunderstanding, the Vorverständnis, is a philosophy, and his philosophy for interpreting the New Testament is Heidegger's. I think he has the better part of the argument against the less sophisticated New Testament scholars, insofar as they say he is using a philosophy to interpret the New Testament. 'But so are you,' he says, 'and I know what my philosophy is; yours is just a set of unconscious assumptions. I am making it quite plain to people what I am presuming. You are unconsciously - perhaps deliberately, but then you are just trying to fool them - passing off your assumptions without letting them know.' Again it is a case of the interlocking of the data; give one, take one, so far, but the questions that are raised about history, and especially about a history such as that of the New Testament, are not easily settled in that manner. The historian's view of human nature, of human destiny, plays a fundamental role in the selection, first of all, of the field that he studies (why is he interested in the New Testament?) as well as in the way he goes about it, the types of thought he appeals to to illuminate the New Testament, the selection of topics, and so on. (I suppose there is no element in history that has been studied with such intensity and such a terrific flow of volumes during the past century as all that is concerned with the New Testament. It is an overworked field, in many ways.) There is very clearly in the New Testament, taken as a historical document, the problem of how far does our understanding of the text take us, and how much does that understanding of the text depend upon other factors. (Fs)

60a Finally, of course, there is the naive approach, unaware of the issue. People have their own minds, and that's good common sense; when the odier fellow's assumptions begin to appear and reveal differences of interpretation, well, he's wrong. But they have not too much consciousness that they are doing the same sort of thing themselves. (Fs)
So much for technical history. (Fs)