This is a very good observation Chuck. I had not thought of it in that way before. Don't you however see Dilthey's and Heidegger's (the latter largely following Dilthey) turn toward historicism as in part a reaction against this? (I really have to reread Sein und Zeit's comments on Dilthey!) I immediately add the caveat that Heidegger's historicism largely is, as you point out, a historicism of texts and past world-views gleaned through texts, without much reaching out to their place in the larger history of wars, rising and falling empires and so forth.
I think it's no coincidence that this attitude toward the text in a Protestant country, with Protestantism's concentration on studying Holy Writ. And it's probably also not a coincidence that Heidegger was such a big fan of Martin Luther! (Personally I think much of what is thought of as a "Kierkegaardian" influence on Heidegger is actually the Heidegger's profound interest in Luther and Augustine manifesting itself.)
--- Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote: As far as I can tell as an American completely divorced from this tradition, the real intellectual problem was most of the German academy were schooled in an a-historical idealism (Kant, Frickt, Schelling, Jacobi, et at), which was a by-product of both the enlightenment and neo-classicism, where works, ideas and concepts as such were understood completely independent of their origin, time, place and circumstance. This kind of a-historic knowledge was part of the foundation of German cultural-studies, or cultural science in the period. On the one hand it commanded a grand analytical insight but at the cost of very little historical context dependent understanding.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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