History, so far from depending on testimony, has therefore no relation with testimony at all. Testimony is merely chronicle. So far as anyone speaks of authorities or of accepting statements or the like, he is talking of chronicle and not of history. History is based on a synthesis of two things which only exist in that synthesis: evidence and criticism.
N.B. As a lawyer with a fair amount of trial work under my belt, this reluctance to accept testimony as a form of evidence puzzles me. Of course, testimony can prove unreliable for reasons intentional (to wit, lying) and through inadvertence (faulty memory; see the work of psychologist Elizebeth Loftus). But this is why we cross-examine testimony. The historian can, in her own way, cross-examine past "testimony." Some testimony may also be hearsay, but that doesn't necessarily equate with unreliability.
My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.
Immediacy perception gives us the bare facts, the discreet things that populate our awareness, the surface of Bergson’s analysis and the ‘granulated’ bits and pieces of Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘cerebral’ consciousness.
It was not until the post-war years [referring to WWI], which brought a willingness to tear down outmoded intellectual structures, that Germany would offer a soil in which Kierkegaardian thought could take root. Nietzsche and the so-called life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), Bergson, Dilthey, and Simmel had prepared the way for Kierkegaard in Germany. In Nietzsche, systematic philosophy saw its fundamental tenets threatened for the first time, for Nietzsche’s destruction of old psychological assumptions revealed the extra-philosophical, psychic, and vital energies that actually motivated philosophers to philosophize.
The counterargument, which I’m defending, is Astwood’s belief that those who fatten easily are fundamentally, physiologically and metabolically different from those who don’t.
