Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Problem der Geschichte, der historische Jesus, Huizinga - Relativismus; Geschichte auf d. Ebene des Urteils

Kurzinhalt: Collingwood - Dedektivgeschichte mit falschen Zeugen; Exegeten: not seeking to arrive at truth, it is seeking to reconstitute the image of the past

Textausschnitt: illustrates his concept of history as science, at least one aspect of it, by a detective story in which all the clues were planted and all the witnesses were lying. The detective's problem was to find out what really happened by seeing why the clues would be planted and why the people were lying. In other words, ...
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There can be false ideals in historical inquiry. German exegetes during the nineteenth century spent a great deal of time trying to reach the historical Jesus, to get behind the gospel to what really happened and what really was said, and they came to the conclusion that it couldn't be done. You can't reach the historical Jesus. ... It is not seeking to arrive at truth, it is seeking to reconstitute the image of the past, the cinema of the past, and the soundtrack of the past, where you haven't got the evidence for doing so. The astronomer
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You can have history under a relativist influence ... and it was to the effect that history is a culture interpreting its past to itself, and the interpretation varies with the present, so that you have German history of, say, 1810, 1840, 1870, ..
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Can there be an approach to history in terms of truth, the third level, judgment? I think that there can be. ... The fundamental problem is the problem of interpretation, and how you arrive at a correct interpretation. Insofar as there are counterpositions active and successful within the field of those writing history, insofar as most historians certainly would not be interested in any methodical discussion, this more or less puts the historians, the people who did the work, in the same class as the physicists who are very good at performing experiments but not so hot at the mathematics. A situation is created by quantum mechanics and relativity: the people who could do the experiments, for a while anyway, were complaining,