Scot Herrigel

I had an interesting thought the other night about the formation of ideas and insights.  This occurred, I believe, because of a new book I am reading - a biography of Washington by Joseph J. Ellis.  The book has been quite enjoyable.  It is very interesting to me to learn about the conditions of life over 200 years ago, to witness, through literary portrayals, both direct and indirect, the content and form of such life and to subsequently compare these antiquated conditions to the present ones.  I experienced, because of this historical perspective, a sense of the immense age of the world, the tremendous changes that have occurred over the long road of time; how differently men and women lived two hundred years ago and how that time, so distant, is directly related to my present experience.  This insight was indubitably generated as a result of my reaction to the Washington biography but it also seemed to foment, to call forth, something I had read by Nietzsche a while back, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I believe.  This was the thought, or maybe more rightly, the imperative, that man must experience himself not as an isolated ego, but as the direct result or inheritor of a prodigious past and also as the benefactor of an unknown futurity.  It is a myth, a falsity, to view oneself as exclusively one’s property.  A person is the result of compounded and sustained human action.  I am not here because of myself: my existence is predicated on the multitude of humans, or individuals, or egos, that came before me and put in the work that allowed for me to exist.  It is selfish buffoonery, as such, to maintain that one’s actions are responsible for effects only within the sphere of one’s immediate individuality:  Being entails responsibility toward all that has been and all that is yet to be.   There is no escape from this truth, for the absence of action produces the absence of an effect, which in itself constitutes a negative contribution and therefore directly affects posterity.

In essence, the historical sense engendered by the Washington biography served to enhance the Nietzschean insight.  It was experienced as a profundity because of the immense disparity between the conditions in which Washington existed and the conditions in which I exist.  I am living in a mechanically heated house, enjoying the benefits of myriad electrically sustained appliances that provide me with different forms of sensory pleasure.  I am also able to travel great distances in relative comfort through automobiles and trains and planes.  Washington, on the other hand, at my age, was subsisting in a wilderness imbued with brutality and divided by warring factions, one in which tribal war parties would regularly raid isolated wilderness abodes and truculently and indiscriminately murder and scalp man, woman and child.  He encountered on a regular basis death, mutilation and hardship.  But it was not so much that Washington, himself, experienced these things, but really the ensuing inference that that was the world, that people endured such tribulations and that I am the result of their endurance.  The world of two hundred and fifty years ago is so different from the world of today, it is almost like and alien planet in the universe of time.  There is a shock inherent in confronting the past, in recognizing that what has been really has been.  And this, in my basically trivial opinion, constitutes one of the real benefits of studying history:  the attainment of the historical perspective, the enhancement and enlargement of context and the confrontation with wildly different realities.  By understanding the past not purely as the past, that is as something which has happened and is therefore immutable, but, instead, as something which happened dynamically and indeterminately, one gains an insight into the capacity of the present to affect the future.  The present ceases to represent the measure of reality but instead becomes one form, one manifestation of time:  history undermines the hubris of an age.  It forces one to confront their vital connection to the past and thereby also instructs one of their capacity and responsibility toward the future.

Posted on February 18th, 2010 by admin
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