Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: das historische Bewusstsein

Kurzinhalt: Geschichte als Produkt des Menschen wurde weitgehend der säkularen Welt überlassen

Textausschnitt: We have come to realize that we are more the masters of our own destiny than we had thought. The self-assertion of modern man contains a notable measure of truth: man is responsible for his history; man is largely what man has made of man. But this self-assertion has been left largely to the initiative of the secularists, and the result has been the de-Christianization of the modern world. Even so-called Catholic countries are to a great extent either backward or de facto non-Catholic. This should not surprise us: it is not merely the Bourbons who forget nothing, learn nothing, and like things that way. But also, Christianity is a wisdom, and wisdom enters on the scene only when what is going forward becomes clear. The idea of historical consciousness arose outside the church and produced disasters, but we have to consider it seriously. In Hegel's words, 'Only with the fall of twilight does the owl of Minerva take wing.' The church moves slowly but surely. (76f; Fs)
62/3 The self-assertion of modern man has been implemented by philosophy, or, where philosophy deserted the scene, by empirical human science. There has developed a philosophy of human science, a philosophy of politics
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There is a philosophy of history, as in Vico, who began a new phase different from that which held from Augustine to Bossuet. There is the move from Vico, with his insistence on the priority of poetry and the compact symbol, vis-à-vis differentiated consciousness, to Hegel, Marx, and Troeltsch, Through Marx, there is the influence of the philosophy of history on later Russians and Chinese. There is the philosophy of education - already we have mentioned Dewey's influence not only in the United States but worldwide. And today there is the rediscovery of the symbol in depth psychology, in the work of Eliade and the history of religions, in Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in Voegelin's interpretation of the ancient Near East, Israel, and Greece, and in the phenomenologists and existentialists. But there are also the social engineers and the hidden persuaders, the propaganda ministries and the advertising industry. (77; Fs)