History
56th installment to my philosophical system.
“Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” These are Goethe’s words with which, as with a boldly expressed ceterum censeo, we may begin our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of history. Our aim will be to show why instruction which fails to quicken activity, why knowledge which enfeebles activity, why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must, in the spirit of Goethe’s words, be seriously hated; for we still lack what is most necessary, and superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary. Certainly we need history. But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge, even if he in his refinement looks down on our rude and graceless requirements and needs. That is, we require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it: but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.
History has the good fortune of being forgotten; otherwise, all of mankind would labor under the illusion that all this has a purpose. Isn’t that a damning contradiction within history itself? It proclaims to tell of the past truthfully, but marred by its own temporality, only paints a picture of the present accurately, which, in the proceeding infinity which is to follow it, becomes as confused as all our other past experiences. In so doing, history becomes a graveyard for long-dead and long-forgotten events which yearn only to be remembered, but which must perpetually be forgotten—especially when the chronicler’s or historian’s memory finally ceases, and they lay to rest their pens for good. On this aspect of history’s own unhistorical representation, Thomas Browne is immortal:
There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years: Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks. […] But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. —Excerpt from Urn Burial.
The scribbling of history is only good for those who seek to learn from the mistakes of the past. In the passing of our time, we make do with the fact that we exist as such now, and like the rest, shall fade away not long afterwards. While living, we offer up to the world as best we can whatever example we strive to leave after we’re gone, and in doing so provide the human race a benefit in our having been. In trying to forge a legacy for ourselves, however, we often forget what the true reason behind our actions were, and thus do we become like an absurdist or self-reflective nihilist—we become ridiculous in order to spite ourselves, to derive from the pain of our self-made humiliation a new reason for living, for acting, for being.
Life is a long performance not worth rewatching or considering in the end, for history proves its incompetence in making our memory eternal. Such being the case, all are consigned to the flames of our forgetfulness and thus are stricken from the everlasting register of our mind—scrapped completely from the ricordanze of the familial books, those dusty tomes which tout the past, but which really read familiar to our own circumstances today. There is nothing in the past to which the present shall not also succumb. It is for this reason, in fact, that Schopenhauer considered history nothing more than the playing out of the will itself—the repetition of events for which the will was responsible. He even went as far as to say that no reading of history is necessary after Herodotus, for it all rings the same; all one gets out of a thumbing through of, say, Tacitus or Plutarch, is the same vain ambitions pursued over and over again by avaricious men who strove to conquer the world for no other reason than their own dissatisfaction with already having everything a plebeian could dream of. Because of their own sense of iniquity with regards to their fate, they unleashed untold misery upon the world. But what else is new? As I write this now, a war is being waged upon Iran by the US and Israel for no discernible reason aside from regime change, justified on the basis of threat prevention and security; all this would seem to confirm Schopenhauer’s non-teleological view of history—and I am to agree with Schopenhauer on this point.
Nothing is new in the affairs of men. Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 has it:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
There is nothing that can be called new, really, for all that is immediately considered new is that which becomes the past the instant it is perceived. All man has is the present, ever constant, in which he is in a continuous battle against—overcoming all manner of distractions and bouts of tiredness which weaken his resolve to do anything productive or worthy of a person who wishes to leave behind a memory of himself. Our life is a long thought played out and reconsidered from every side, angle, and aspect, all before we finally decide to give up the contemplation of it and make do with a faith in ourselves to overcome the doubt which eternally pervades it. History is really doubt made tangible in its illustrative form—all taken from the same old mistakes which man has been making since he first gained consciousness. Conscious life is nature’s nightmare to man. In an effort to make it through existence without much difficulty, one would do best to try as little as possible in it, in order that tranquility of mind may be preserved, even in the most trying circumstances.
The existential aspect of history is really the story of doubt—and I would like to quickly note here that the word history itself derives from the Latin historia, which itself comes from the Ancient Greek historíā (”inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation”), from hístōr (”wise man, judge”), but is commonly translated in the Romance languages today as “story”: Histoire (French), Storia (Italian), and Historia (Spanish). With this etymology before us, it would seem like those wise men and women of the past were only considered so by their ability to inquire into the past without confusing themselves with what is in the present.
You see at once, then, how all our lives are bound by the capacity of our memory; we’re only as good as our minds allow us to be—the more we remember, the more we can draw on and learn from. And so, nature has acted on mankind in such a way so as to reproduce this faculty of memory, and with that comes language, too. Without recollection of experience, there would be no sense of the past at all, and all a priori categories of perception would fall flat, for they would not correlate with any of our experience presently: the first man would have been as dumb as the last, and Homo sapiens would have been no different from all the other billions of species that have existed and gone extinct on Earth. We quite literally could have been nothing more than a footnote to the Earth—and, in truth, that is all we’re waiting to become.
But while we exist, it is enough to consider ourselves from a singular, perspectival view, for now at least, from which we can make for ourselves a narrative or vision which most corresponds with our own desires presently—subject to change with time, of course, but always willing to remain fluid, never one to stick with a single perspective for too long. So long as our memory is with us, we shall always have a story to tell; a place which we can go to in our minds in order to weigh and consult, a place which offers us repose from the constant flux of time and the ever-advancing front of history which presses itself upon all of us. Do we all not feel this condition of life? This sense of fatigue, our aging, our wrinkles, our balding, our sterility, the loss of our vital powers, etc.? It, I think, behooves us to turn history into a subject of note, rather than a mere compilation of disconnected facts and dates which don’t necessarily connect with our lives currently. In reality, we can’t understand how our lives came to be without understanding what came before us.
History is the repository of human sentiments. Everything which we think or consider has some historical connection or parallel, and from this culling of connected facts, we develop the whole picture before us, of what the real world was playing out or moving towards by the most contingent of circumstances. The doubt which began with a fault in our memory has led us to find and consider history as the only subject from which we have something to learn—there’s something genuine in history that few other subjects offer. Out of all the academic disciplines in the world, history stands highest among them if we consider it from a strictly subjective stance; in history lies our collective story—of civilization, of war, of ruler and ruled, of revolt and revolution, of culture and decadence. Everything is there for us to plunder and extract, in order that we may acquire some clue as to where we’re heading in the future: the course of humanity has no destination, but it certainly likes to think of itself as going somewhere special.
On the question of whether history rhymes rather than repeats itself exactly—I find Mark Twain said a very wise thing, but like all wise things, it is more often than not lost in the history of its own transmission. Without question, history does both: history reflects, but always inverting the image, making left right and right left. Again, it has to be noted that every theory which has ever been devised regarding the march of history can hardly be said to always bring positive change; in fact, just the opposite has seemingly always been the case. From Plato and Aristotle to Ibn Khaldun and Machiavelli; from Grotius and Selden to Gibbon and Macaulay; from Lord Acton and Oswald Spengler to Will Durant and Arnold Toynbee—all have been attempts to systematize the ungainly mass that is history, with all of its interconnected facts, which are so diverse and unique to each geographic location that a single man could never command the whole of it without great difficulty. History as these men have tried to overcome it is very dry, prolix, and unlikely to induce any prolonged interest in the subject—with the clear exception being made for Will Durant, who wrote history from a philosophic-literary perspective rather than in a bland academic one, concerned more with footnotes and citations than the beauty of history itself—history as a living process that is vital in an existential sense. Nowhere is Durant ever dry, and even when prolix, he is still an enjoyable read.
From my own perspective, the best history ever written is the essays of Montaigne, for they tell the history not of an era or of countless millennia, but of a living, breathing man. The best histories are those which are lyrical, which sing, which dance across the page. The concern for veracity in history is a relatively modern perspective—like most life-denying things, it too has its origin in the Enlightenment. Who could ever forget the great stir that Friedrich August Wolf caused when he proposed that the Iliad and Odyssey were not composed by Homer but were instead composed by a collection of authors all belonging to different periods, which were all later edited into their current form today?
Leopold von Ranke is also to blame, more so than anyone else, for to him history was nothing but hearsay if not sourced and verified beyond all doubt—much like how the Muhaddithun, centuries before Ranke, all strove to verify the hadiths of Muhammad. I cannot be bothered, however, to check for myself what someone has or has not said; to me, it matters very little what someone says, less still if they speak lies, and so, I’ve always shielded myself from this type of vulgar historicism. I much prefer a philosophical, or existential (to be precise), theory of history than anything else. It was in this break from tradition that allowed scholars to harshly criticize Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy—not being philological enough, all the classicists and historians of the day were quick to call it sloppy work, lacking evidence, and claiming things without justification in the primary sources, not realizing that Nietzsche was, in writing The Birth of Tragedy, developing his own form of historical analysis: the genealogical, or psychological rather—later developed further by Freud. It was never meant to be strictly historical—it was a philosophical analysis of Greek tragedy whose evidence was drawn from philological and historical connections. In doing that, Nietzsche paved the way to a future kind of thinking—a kind of thinking I’m very much in the tradition of: the existentially philosophical—a kind of thinking meant for those who feel like Dostoevsky’s underground man, or like the pseudonyms of Kierkegaard, or like Pascal when in a fit of despair over his lack of faith. There are some so wretched, history to them is only the pain and torture of existence. That is my kind of history, a history where one gets a taste of blood in their mouth as they read it.
If our memories serve us at all, they could easily be criticized for making us forget as often as we do; but at the same time, this forgetfulness gives birth to a new type of thinking. A new kind of man is produced when he views himself as he actually is, rather than what the external forces of his reality make him—there is an existential aspect of history which very few dare to approach; this is why I said Montaigne wrote one of the best histories ever—his history was a vita propria liber (A Book of One’s Own Life), and in that, we got the whole of an age as told from a single perspective. I’ve always been a fan of autobiographies—from the first time I read Benjamin Franklin’s (which was the first actually) to Cellini’s, Cardano’s, J.S. Mill’s, Lincoln’s, etc. To hear life as told from one still living allows one to connect more readily, and in that connection creates encouragement and upliftment, even hope in some instances.
History should only serve to instruct, to enliven, to empower—anything that does not quicken my activity is wasted on me and has no place even being considered by me. All things in life worthy of our attention should receive it fully, and if not, let them be cast by the wayside, forever to fall into obscurity and oblivion. I have no more time to waste my life. My life is so precious to me that I ought to cherish each forgotten moment as a kind of eternal history. History has been told from every perspective, and I doubt there will ever be an exhaustive explication of all of it. History, in my view, is a subject best summarized in a phrase rather than in a book, and in this respect, no one matches Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.“ What this implies is what I said at the very start: that history is always understood too late, and it is so because of how weak and forgetful our historical memory is generally.
This is our history: a long-forgotten story retold many times before, as it shall be many times after—a history of strife, struggle, toil, labor, all for little reward. And to think, this is what people say is the greatest boon about life—that it has no essence behind it, and rather is like a canvas for us to paint on, and in the process of doing so, create ourselves. It’s existential, I’ll give it that, but I find very little inspiring in it. I could never find myself content with merely drawing upon history for life; I was always interested in creating my own life history, developing my own capacities enough to be considered an honorable mention in the annals of history. And though this is the vain ambition of youth speaking, it is a thoroughly honest approach to individual history—it’s philosophical, in fact, for the facts I draw from are my own, and in doing so I make myself a part of history, rather than simply one among billions. I am no number or cipher, no “———” within the crowd. I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am what I am, and I will be what I will be.
The history of history is really the history of our own individual lives. What we are, we are; and though we may not find ourselves being who we want to be, while we still have time and life, there is power enough within us to will a future—a future for all people to read, in our own book of history.