[149] possibilities in Kant with present-day EXISTENTIALISM^a, then use it---it is the best book about this. Now here you see what the truth of interpretation^b is. The truth of interpretation is: you try to find out, with all your heart and strength, what the author really has said. You must be an excellent philologist in order to comment [on] one sentence of the Old or New Testament. You must know the languages---and here I make a great question-mark about present-day theological or also philosophical education (if it is the Greek or Latin authors in philosophy), and you must be able to see these verses in the light of the contemporary literature, ideas, use of words, etc. ---all what we call philology^c. Then you must try to understand the meanings. And if you try to understand the meaning, you create something "third^d." Now this makes a fact understandable which I really indicated in terms of the interpretation of the Bible---now in more than 200 centuries, 2500 years, about, when we add the Old Testament comments and interpretations which are partly in the texts of all Bibles themselves. Then another example in a much larger sense and nearer to history as a whole. Take Greek culture. Greek culture has been interpreted, from the day of its existence on, first by itself--- for instance by Aristotle, in his Politeia, then by the Romans, then by the Germanic-Romanic nations, then by the Middle Ages, then by the Renaissance, then by the Enlightenment, then by classicism, then by modern realism, and today by the TRAGIC feeling towards the world, and the rediscovery of Greek tragedy. Now as you have this whole history of interpretation of Greek culture, you cannot say, "Some people were better acquainted with the facts than others, and the nearer to Werner Jaeger^e, the better one knows about the Greeks." Now he himself would deny such nonsense violently; he knew that his teachers ALSO knew Greek^f and Greek literature. But you must say something quite different, namely that according to the different situations in our own history, the encounter with the Greek reality---after the philological problems where there is progress and better insights, have been solved---that after all this has happened, another image of Greek reality occurs. And the GREAT historians are those who give us these images. They know the facts;