The premature refutation of relativism

Joseph Margolis

University of South Carolina

pp. 49-63

in: Frank M. Kirkland, Chattopadhyaya (eds), Phenomenology: East and West, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

In this late day in the twentieth century, reaffirming Leopold von Ranke's motto with conviction, "Wie es eigentlich gewesen",¹ cannot fail to be doubly misleading. Ranke, of course, deliberately drew his scrupulous archival studies of determinate "memoirs, diaries, letters"² into the encompassing order of indissoluble, plural geistlich individualities that could in principle never yield to similar methods; and contemporary historical scholarship, presuming an objectivity of detail comparable with the objectivity of the natural sciences, would completely disjoin, if it could, the meaning of Ranke's words from its original idealist intuitions.