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George Santayana (reportedly) says:
"All history is wrong and has to be rewritten."
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4 comments:
Why are you quoting this man? Why does should he matter to you or any of us?
I quote him because I think this is a challenging idea, to acknowledge that each of our particular identities are founded--at least to some degree--on a particular rewriting of history.
I think it bears out in practice, in the sense that many ideologies that gain popular appeal are based on a certain oversimplification of the facts. At the very least, there's always some "trimming of the fat" that needs to happen to cast a compelling, relevant version of the past.
Santayana is most famous for the following aphorism: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Is this statement meant to include the paradox that history, once rewritten, is still wrong and needs to be rewritten again? Are we to engage in a perpetual cycle of rewriting history, resulting in no concrete ideas about what actually happened?
Nicholas,
Yes, I think the statement very much alludes to the fact that each new idealogical movement will find available histories "wrong" and find it necessary to re-write their own.
But we don't need to worry about experiencing the futility of perpetual re-writings: It is impossible to survive outside of an ideology for more than a few moments--woah, I'm already feeling existentially woozy--and the particular ideology we accept will always be made concretely manifest as The Definitive Truth, which I feel and see and all of nature constantly reaffirms.
Fortunately, it seems that the existence of creation is apparently not founded upon my (inherently unstable) personal experience of truth.
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