The liquid visionaries
03
Jul
Analyzing Dilthey’s “romantic” vision of history,
Hans-Georg Gadamer first emphasizes his rightness that “what we call the meaning of life is constituted, many times before any scientific objectification, within a natural vision of life about itself ” (GADAMER, 2006, p. 31).
However, he will criticize Dilthey, that “every expression of life implies a knowledge that forms it from within”, and returning to the analysis from Hegel, he questions his vision of an objective spirit, if the “ethical environment in which he lives and the which he shares with others constitutes something “solid” that allows him to orient himself despite the somewhat vague contingencies of his subjective élans” (Gadamer, 2006, p. 32), the emphasis on the solid was made by the author.
The author remembers Dilthey’s “Investigating solid forms” (one of the themes of the Collection of Writings), which implies that both contemplation and reflection “always imply practical experience”, then contests Gadamer: “in Dilthey’s eyes, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, no less than the meditative reflection of philosophy, is an unfolding of the natural tendencies of life” (GADAMER, 2006, pp. 32).
In the same collection, recalls Gadamer, Dilthey said that “our task… will be to explain how the relative values of an era can acquire a somehow absolute dimension” and despite being a concern with the absolute, the path between relativism and totality is quite another, since Dilthey’s “being consciously a conditioned being” is not an explicit critique of idealism.
All this philosophy, says Gadamer, starts from a certain intellectualism, I would say, from a “liquid” visionary and points to an “intellectualist motivation of the objection to relativism, an intellectualism incompatible not only with the ultimate implication of his philosophy of life, but also with the starting point chosen by him, that is, the immanence of knowledge in life itself” (GADAMER, 2006, p. 36).
It clarifies Dilthey’s point of view “which demands that his philosophy extends to all domains in which “consciousness, through a reflective and doubtful attitude, finds itself freed from the dominance of authoritarian dogmas and aspires to true knowledge” ‘ (Gadamer, 2006, p. 34) quoting Dilthey himself in quotation marks, from his Collection of Writings.
The questions of the spirit in Hegelian philosophy always remained in the vague concept of the absolute, and never understood the question of contemplation, of a knowledge beyond, its transcendence is that which goes from the subject to the object without any divine or superior plan.
This was Thomas’ dilemma in carrying out the experience, although he lived with Jesus after his death, he was unable to maintain his conviction and needed to touch the master’s wounds.
GADAMER, H-G. The problem of historical consciousness. Trans. Paulo Cesar Duque Estrada. RJ: Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2006.
