Marcel Chelba – To Lucian Hölscher. On epistemological apriorism, constitutive uncertainty and the lyricism of historiography

Posted on by Marcel Chelba

Open letter on the epistemological antinomy of historiography.

Kantinomus Verlag, Tübingen, 2023. 12 pages. 1,99 Euro.

ISBN: 978-3-911041-00-3

°Dear Professor Lucian Hölscher,

your paper (Zeitgärten. Zeitfiguren in der neuzeitlichen Geschichtsschreibung) at the Göttingen Symposium1 was one of the most exciting.

Here is the quote I promised you in our short break:

„It is a custom, for retail researchers and dry souls, whose objectivity is nothing more than the inability to be subjective, to consider as dilettantism everything that is presented in other clothing than mere formulas of transmission.

(…) The historical »truths« are of discernment, not of simple finding and reproduction. To catch them requires all the profound knowledge of the language, everything that the creative fantasy of definitions can find finer and more delicate. To talk about the people and things of the past in the current vocabulary means to fail from one end to the other.

I wish I had more »poetic« talent to be closer to the truth.”

This quote is from…

………………………………………………

What certainties can we have in regard to something that remains for us eternally hidden? – Kant wondered, in his own way, in the Critique of Pure Reason; and, in principle, his answer was that, since reality (thing in itself) always remains somewhere outside, beyond the limits of our own sensibilities, it means that everything that seems to us (at one point) we perceive is nothing but a construction of our own productive imagination.

This is precisely why, Kant continues, in order to advance in the knowledge of nature, we must first deepen into our own questions and then go on to unknown realms, otherwise our empirical experiences would be nothing more than a groping in the dark.

Empirically (historically), the object precedes the concept, but, phenomenologically (historiographically), the concept precedes the object. Kant’s entire philosophical work revolved around solving this epistemological antinomy, and the solution he found…°

1  Das 2. APHIN-Symposium: Realität und Wirklichkeit – Vom Finden und Erfinden unserer Welt. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 29. November 2019.

Marcel Chelba – To Lucian Holscher (I)Download PDF for Free