Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Titel: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Stichwort: Erklärende Geschichte (explanatory history) in: Philosophie, Kunst, allgemeine Geschichte; Sorokin

Kurzinhalt: ... but the trouble is that you get many histories because you have many different upper blades.

Textausschnitt:
62a Now we go a little further into the complexity of the problem. We ask about the history of philosophy. A philosopher from the viewpoint of his philosophy can write an explanatory history of philosophy, and he can fill in the lacunae. But another philosopher with a different philosophy can do the same thing, and you get different results, because any philosophy will supply an upper blade if it is sufficiently developed, and it can take on the form of a philosophy of philosophies. Also, it can take on the task of fulfilling the function of an upper blade in the history of philosophy. The trouble is that there are many philosophies, and the debate here obviously shifts. It is not to be settled so much by historical criteria as by the debate between the philosophies themselves. (Fs)

1.3.3 In Art and Culture

62b The problem of relativism is illustrated in reduced form by the problem of the history of philosophy. A third instance,1 where a further complication arises, occurs when you come to the history of art, the history of a literature or literatures, the history of culture, the history of religions. The further complication is not only that there are many types of religious belief, many types of literature, and so on - there are many philosophies, and the multiplicity of the philosophies is also reflected in the religions and the arts and the cultures - but also that in this case there is a concreteness, and so a resistance to the systematic conceptualization which is of the essence, as it were, of such subjects as mathematics or physics. (Fs)

1.3.4 In General History

63a Now one comes to the final question on this point of explanatory history. There can be an upper blade for things like mathematics and medicine, and to get, as it were, unambiguous results, not a multiplicity of results, you can write explanatory history, you can complement technical history with explanatory. Secondly, you can write explanatory history of philosophy and similar things, or of theology, but the trouble is that you get many histories because you have many different upper blades. History of art and culture introduces a further complexity in its concreteness. Can there be an upper blade for general history, history in the ordinary sense as contrasted with, say, a history of capitalism?2 (Fs) (notabene)

63b A contender for the position is sociology. Sociology is the study of human society at a given time and place, but this sociology over time should provide history with an upper blade, should do for history what the science of mathematics does for the history of mathematics. Something along that line was attempted by a sociologist, a Russian emigre, Pitirim Sorokin. In the thirties, he published four large volumes of Social and Cultural Dynamics.3 It is largely artistic but deals also with several other types of things that he was classifying. What he was proving was the existence of a cycle, and it was applied to Hellenistic and Western culture extended over 2500 years. All I know about this work is that, to do a thing like this, you have to introduce categories, such as a field, and Sorokin's categories were not properly sociological; rather they were philosophic. His fundamental division was of cultures: were they sensate, idealistic, or ideational? These categories correspond roughly to Kierkegaard's three spheres of existential subjectivity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious;4 and again, they correspond to the three spheres you get from Insight according as your emphasis is on experience, understanding, or judgment.5 (Fs)

64a What Sorokin really was doing was using philosophic categories rather than sociological categories. Sociological categories would be something much more precise, and would find an application (say, of a cycle, if it were defined sociologically) without going over tremendous amounts of time. And, of course, in the human sciences there is quite a leap from the merely descriptive type of science to explanatory science - even greater than moving in empirical science from talking about things being heavy, hot, and so on, to talking about mass (which is something quite distinct from weight) or temperature (something quite distinct from being hot). That, perhaps, in sociology, is coming out at the present time in a work by Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (which the people at the Gregorian University in Rome who are teaching sociology speak of as 'the bible for sociologists').6 Merton seems to be introducing explanatory categories. Insofar as he is successful, there perhaps will be from sociology a tool that will supply an upper blade. We will discuss that further in this course, and many questions will be raised. (Fs)

64b Another illustration or contender as an upper blade in explanatory history is provided by Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History.7 What is history about? Is it like the history of Canada, or the history of England, or the history of Czechoslovakia? History, says Toynbee, is history of civilizations. The unit of study is the civilization. He pins the subject down to one object, what he calls the civilization; he defines the civilization as a field of interdependence. You cannot write the history of Canada and prescind from the history of France and England. You cannot write the history of a European country and prescind from the history of the neighboring Europeans. But you can write the history of Modern Europe (great parts of it, anyway) and allow for merely incidental contacts between it and, say, China. Consequently, there is here a norm of what he means by civilization - the functional concept of civilization. He uses this to say that there are many civilizations, and he makes a guess at the number. Each has its origin, its development, its breakdowns, its decline, its decay. There are relations in space and time between different civilizations. Finally, in volumes 7 to 10 the push, the moving thing behind the whole business, behind the whole of history, is religion; the basic carrier wave is religion. There you have, taken out of historical study, a set of explanatory categories and a set of principal questions for the historian to deal with. Does that set of categories stand to explanatory history as differential equations stand to physical theory, physical explanation? That is the question. (Of course, I am not supposed to answer them all!) (Fs)

65a Now that is not the whole of Toynbee. There is something else besides that fundamental conceptualization of what history is about (namely, about civilization's distinctive developments). This 'something else' is a set of humanistic categories. I spoke a moment ago about terms like weight, something heavy, and terms like mass, which can be defined only by relation to other masses, and ultimately by the inverse-square law of gravitation. And that is a step which is a purely theoretical type of conceptualization. Again, in scholastic philosophy the fundamental terms come out in pairs: potency and act, matter and form, substance and accident; and their meaning is contained in their relations to one another; you have a closed conceptual system. Now humanistic categories are not of that type. A large part of Toynbee's thinking is in categories drawn from the Greek tragedies, from Shakespeare and the Bible, of course, and from Goethe. It is a type of systematic conceptualization that has a meaning to the cultured Westerner, but it is not a type of systematic conceptualization that you have in explanatory science. (Fs) (notabene)

65b Another try along this line is that of Eric Voegelin. His Order and History has, so far - after the mid-fifties - three volumes published by the Louisiana State University Press.8 He has since gone to Munich. Before that, in the early fifties, the University of Chicago Press published his New Science of Politics.9 In these works, the upper blade is a philosophy of man, a philosophy of man of the type that is not just tied down to Heidegger, but is very much in the movement in which you find Heidegger and historians of religion of the type of Mircea Eliade and Ernst Cassirer - Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms10 - and so on. (Fs)

66a Well, this discussion of history as a subject provides perhaps a step towards philosophy of history. I mentioned an occasional history, which we did not bother to analyze, to set up in opposition; technical history, which is very much down to earth and very solid but appeals to professors; it does not appeal so much to students and even less to the man on the street - he wants 'meaningful' answers to questions! Also, there is explanatory history, which has a great appeal and is beset with very fundamental difficulties. The difficulty that has been most conspicuous is the problem of relativism; it becomes conspicuous in dated history ('that was a fine historical work, but for 1850 or 1910; it does not count any more') or national history, or history that is acceptable to people of certain philosophic convictions or of certain religious convictions - Catholic history, Protestant history, Jewish history, history that will satisfy Arabs, and so on. That problem of relativism, and the possibility of surmounting it somewhat on the historical level, was raised in connection with the notion of explanatory history. I will now attempt to handle briefly my second topic, namely, philosophy of... (Fs)