There is not, nor can there be, any such thing as a bare chronicle of events without a point of view. The great Enlightenment dream of simply recording ‘what actually happened’ is just that: a dream. The dreamer is once more the positivist, who looking at history, believes that it is possible to have instant and unadulteratd access to ‘events’.
At a naive level, this results in the precritical view:
Observer –> Evidence –> Past Event. Simply looking at the evidence and having access to the ‘facts’.
At a more sophisticated level, awareness that evidence cna mislead gives rise to a chastened positivism: the observer sifts the evidence, and reckons that, though some of it is more or less worthless, other bits give the desired direct access. This is the analogy of the positivistic rejection of metaphysics in favour of supposedly ‘hard’ scientific knowledge: Looking at the evidence, sifting it, rejecting some bits and accepting others.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.82
Wright goes on to explain how this really just results in a sort of filtered naivety. It still assumes that a lot of the evidence has direct access to what actually happened. Not only that, but as you can clearly see in the realm of “hard scientific knowledge”, it puffs up the observer with pride about what a brilliant job he has done digging up the real truth. Heh. My rejecting metaphysics, we leave ourselves more in the dark than before.