Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Geschichte: kritische, analytische - spekulative Schule (W.H. Walsh); Lonergan: Schere (obere, untere Klinge)

Kurzinhalt: Walsh's basic distinction is a commonly made one that Lonergan formulates quite simply as the distinction between history as written and history as written about.

Textausschnitt: 6.1 Analytic or Critical Philosophy of History and the Speculative Philosophy of History

4/6 In his Philosophy of History: An Introduction,1 W.H. Walsh sets out a few basic distinctions that will serve to identify some of the major sets of questions and concerns that are addressed in the relevant fields. Clearly contemporary philosophy of history is not a unity but an aggregate. And Walsh traces two roots in this aggregate to Vico in Italy, together with a line of thinkers from Herder to Hegel in Germany on the one hand, and to Dilthey, Rickert and Croce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the other. The two roots represent two positions in a debate that continues to rage over what constitutes a legitimate intellectual contribution to the study of history.2 (166; Fs)

5/6 Walsh's basic distinction is a commonly made one that Lonergan formulates quite simply as the distinction between history as written and history as written about.3 As written about, history is the totality of past events and actions that historians seek to know and explain. As written, history is the account, explanation or narrative of these events or actions that the historian puts together. The collection of all such accounts comprises the corpus of historical writing and most frequently written history is in dialogue with or a commentary upon other works of written history. When conflicts arise among assessments as to what happened or how or why it happened - conflicts that cannot be resolved on this level of writing history - a further 'meta-level' emerges which asks about the nature or process of historical writing and its relation to the history that is written about; what am I doing when I am writing history? Just as the philosophy of science can be an acceptable study of the procedures of scientists so too the philosophy of history can be an acceptable study of the procedures of the historian. And Walsh locates the divergence among the two schools or traditions in the philosophy of history on this further 'meta-level.' The two schools of philosophy of history constitute too different sets of questions that can be asked about the writing of history.4 (166f; Fs)

6/6 In the critical or analytic school, the questions ask about the relation between history as a form of knowledge and other forms of knowledge. This tradition originated, according to Walsh, in Germany in the late nineteenth century and can be associated with names like Dilthey, Droysen, Ranke, Rickert, and Croce. As the field or discipline of historical writing expanded, the questions as to the appropriate methods and procedures for determining the relevant facts, for amassing evidence, for judging truth, and for interpreting both facts and the conclusions of other historians began to abound. Historians discovered that data was selected differently from age to age and from place to place, and that interpretations as to what data was relevant for an explanation reflected more the convictions and allegiances of historians than the horizons of the age being studied. Finally, the various historians and historical schools found themselves divided on what it was they were supposed to be doing. Does the historian simply narrate a course of events or does (s)he explain these events in terms of antecedent events or consequent outcomes? Can events and courses of events be classified? Are there operative patterns or laws to history? Is there an overall intelligibility to history as a whole? (167; Fs) (notabene)

7/6 At the limits of this first school of philosophy of history a set of questions begin to emerge which had horrified the working historians since the German idealists began developing their sweeping accounts of the overarching course of historical process.5 Historians have feared that grand accounts of the meaning, purpose, telos of humanity and of the principal features or determinates of historical causation did violence to a careful empirical study of history. These broad questions about human nature and about the structure and the orientation of the whole of the history that is written about have been the concern of the second school of philosophy of history, the speculative school.6 But their contemporary proponents, the speculative philosophers of history who have upheld a tradition since Vico, Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx, argue that there is no getting around some implicit or explicit view on such fundamental questions. Walsh argues that contemporary answers to the questions raised by these speculative philosophers certainly need to emerge more carefully from a concrete study of empirical of history. But in Walsh's view the theories of the great speculative thinkers can still operate as hypotheses which the historian can carry with him or her into the empirical study and which must be evaluated in terms of the contemporary data.7 (167; Fs)

8/6 To locate Lonergan's emergent probability within this vast field of questions and answers it would be helpful to begin with an image or analogy introduced in a talk that he gave at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal on September 23, 1960, entitled 'The Philosophy of History.'8 Much of the material in this talk is reworked and refined in the eighth and ninth chapters of Method in Theology9 But the 'scissors analogy' remains relevant and suggestive. (167f; Fs)

9/6 Lonergan addresses himself to the two sets of questions which I have distinguished above as corresponding to the two schools of philosophy of history.10 And to sketch a route through the first set, from the analytic or critical school, he introduces his often quoted analogy of the two-bladed scissors.11 As is the case in the empirical sciences the historian operates not simply with data, with texts, with observation, with the testimonies of witnesses, with his or her own insights and judgments and those of others (the lower blade of the scissors) but also with a set of anticipations as to the shape or structure of the final account or explanation (the upper blade). (168; Fs)

10/6 In the natural sciences Galileo's set of anticipations was the axiomatic system of Euclidian geometry. With Newton it was a similar set of axioms, deductions, empirically verified constants and logically deducible, universally verifiable laws called mechanics. With Einstein and Heisenberg the introduction of notions like indeterminacy and discontinuity into the upper blade of method shattered the lawful determinism of Newtonian mechanics and changed radically the anticipations as to what a final explanation of physical processes would look like. The work of Monod, summarized in 2.2 above, reflects the impact of these revised anticipations. (168; Fs)

11/6 In the field of historiography, whose methods were progressively refined through the contributions of analytic or critical philosophy of history since Ranke, Droysen and Dilthey, a wide sweep of types of 'upper blades' emerged after the late nineteenth century. At one pole of the sweep stands a set of positions that emphasize historical relativity. And as an example, Johan Huizinga defines history as a people interpreting its past to itself.12 Since the people interpreting are almost never the same as the people who lived this past, the interpretation will necessarily differ in orientation, in its selection of significant details, in its assessment of what is of value, from the lived world of the historical actors. Thus there will always be several histories and the horizon of the written history will be the horizon of the writer.13 (168; Fs)

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20/6 In each of these cases various answers to questions about the elements and the structure of the history that is written about were related integrally to the author's conception of the enterprise and the methods of historiography. And so Walsh's suggestion that the theories of the great speculative philosophers of history be understood and assessed by contemporary historians and philosophers is surely a good one. But is there not another angle or tack that can be taken on both sets of issues together? Is there not a basis in epistemology or cognitional theory to both sets of questions? An account of the substance and dynamic structure of historical events and processes is itself an act of knowing as are the procedures of historiography. Indeed there would seem to be some truth in conceiving intelligence as, in some way, constitutive of history. It becomes clear in the more 'relativist' positions that what one conceives as the structure and the limits to acts of knowing history determines how one conceives what the historian is writing about. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey understood the integral connections among cognitional theory, one's conception of the substance and dynamic structure of history, and the enterprise and methods of historiography. (171f; Fs)