Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Phenomenolgy and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism

Titel: Phenomenolgy and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism

Stichwort: Existentialismus (allgemeine Bestimmung); Zeit und Geschichte

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 5 Time and History
223b This resonance with contemporary history fits in with existentialist concern with time and with history. 'Being a man' is not a result of your being born. It is something that results from your use of freedom, and what results from your use of freedom is not a property that necessarily remains with you. It is maintained by the continuous use of your freedom. It is precarious. One is ever being a man or becoming a man; one does not achieve it. You can play the hero for a day and be just the opposite the next day. So this business of 'being a man' is intrinsically connected with the notion of time, and that intrinsic connection with the notion of time involves a connection with history in the sense of the development of human institutions, human cultures, and human ideas. (Fs) (notabene)
224a The intrinsic connection between 'being a man' and time is highlighted in Heidegger's title Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and in Marcel's title Homo Viator,1 man as a being on the way. However, concern with history on the grand scale appears only in Jaspers, as far as I know. His book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History) was published in Munich by Piper in 1949, and they released the eleven-thousandth copy in 1950. The other thinkers probably do not have the capacity to take such a broad view of history as Jaspers does in that book. Of course the center of history for a Christian is the birth of Christ, and there is 'before Christ' and 'after Christ.' But Jaspers starts out from the viewpoint of the history of culture, and for him the decisive period is what he calls the Achsenzeit, the axial period, which he locates in the period extending from about 800 B.C. to 200 B.C. There we find the rise of individualism and of philosophies of all types in Greece, the Hebrew Prophets, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, Confucius and Lao-Tzu in China. Jaspers maintains that, while there were higher civilizations prior to that Achsenzeit, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, still those higher civilizations were simply enormous organizations of man. There was not man the individual, in the sense that the self-responsible individual thinking for himself was not significant in those civilizations. In the civilizations created during the Achsenzeit, in those five areas and within approximately a span of six hundred years that in Greece stems roughly from Homer to Archimedes, there emerged the individual. Any civilization that has come into contact with the Greeks since the Achsenzeit has either absorbed the Greek capacity for philosophy or else has vanished. People who do not come in contact with that development remain on the level of folk cultures or primitive cultures. His judgment on our own time is that it is not another Achsenzeit, but is rather something comparable to the initial discovery of fire, or of language, or of the fundamental art on which human living is based. He sees this in technical society and in the unification of the world. Jaspers is the most cultivated, the most broadly humanistic, and in a sense the most balanced and sane of any of these writers. He is a man of considerable talent, and he has none of the oddities that you find in, for example, Heidegger or Sartre. (Fs)
225a So much for what is positive.2 First, then, we are concerned with what it is to be a man, in the sense that 'being a man' results from the use of freedom and that 'being a man' is not a method that you acquire once for all. Second, 'being a man' remains something predicated precariously on the continuous use of freedom. It stands in radical opposition both to any positivistic approach to a consideration of man - to human science based upon the externals of man, on his behavior, on what you can observe or infer or predict on that basis - and again to idealism: the transcendental ego doesn't suffer or die, and we do. (Fs)