Claudia Serban
2. " Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it." ( George
Santayana. 1863-1952."The Life of Reason",ch.12)
The implications of this statement that
I am going to discuss and argue for or against develop themselves at
multiple levels: theoretical, ethical, practical. Therefore I shall choose
two main principles, directly derived from the test, that could unify by
their constant presence, either explicit or subsidiary, a discourse that
otherwise may take the risk of lack of visible coherence between its
layers. These two principles that I shall place at the center of my
argumentation are: the dialogue with tradition seen in it’s plural aspects
and the possibility of learning from our own errors, of self-criticism and
selfcorrection. Although stated separately, the two hypotheses of work
mentioned above are deeply connected, as they both offer the grounds for a
certain vision about human knowledge and experience. Whether this vision
is arguable or desirable, I shall attempt to decide through my arguments.
First, as I interpret that Santayana
calls memory of the past under the sign of fertile dialogue with
tradition, I would like to point out how this way of understanding our
relationship with the "once-said" detachers itself from dominant views
such as Plato’s anamnesis or the cartesian model. The reason might stand
in the fact that it approaches human experience not as a revelation or an
accomplishment of a non-human ultimate ground of things, but as an
entirely human produc t and as the main argument of what we call our
humanity. While Plato’s model of learning, though paradoxically invoking
memory as well, implies breaking through the veil of appearances and
catching sight of the eidos that is uncontamined by temporality and
therefore does not know such laws as succession or repetition, the memory
that Santayana refers to does not imply a revelation of the hidden essence,
but preservation of our vaste cultural inheritage. And while the Cartesian
epistemological model that has reigned in modernity implies as a prelude
to true knowledge a voluntary "oblivion" of the whole tradition in order
to reach the main undeniable certainties, the principle of dialogue
represents quite the opposite imperative.
Still, far from nihilistic denial,
remembering the past and starting a dialogue with tradition must be
equally far from unconditioned admiration and non-critical preservation.
If we choose to follow the mideggerian precept of the Schritt Luruck
instead of distructive indifference or denial, our eye should be both open,
receptive and critical, selective, just as authentic dialogue is based not
only on passive desponibility to listen but also on the initiative of
feedback. This implies that what I could call the lessons of the past c an
be learned only by a critical attitude.
Nevertheless, assuming a critical
position while internalizing the lessons of tradition involves, as long as
experience and knowledge are conceived as the product and the basis of our
humanity, the highly major aspect of assuming responsibility. Remembering
the past makes impossible attitudes such as those adopted by determinists
or by historicists (in the Popperian meaning), which place both merit and
blame and even the sense of everything that happened or is abo ut to on
grounds that are exterior to the human world of free creative will. And
besides this, responsibility is the one that, once assumed (in a manner
similar to the Sartriau percept that " there are no inhuman situations")
makes criticism logically possible and worth" what sense would otherwise
be in criticizing something that didn’t depend on us?
In this manner, preserving tradition
into our memory and challenging it dialogue provides us with a most useful
horizon of lessons, cautions into which the present experience can develop
without repeating either the mistakes, either aspects that would risk to
become clichés and inhibit innovation.
That is, coping with contingencies that
are present, but avoiding the errors mirrored by the past and thus definin
g ourselves as beings capable of self-correction through selfcriticism. Up
to now, we have seen that memory and dialogue appropriate the past and the
tradition as essentially human realities, saving them from dissolution
within a view of knowledge with a no horizon, not affected by human
historicity or finitude. In a similar way, they save it from another
danger of misinterpretation if knowledge and experience have a past that
should be preserved by memory, they are historical and therefore they
exclude the utopical possibility of an absolute new beginning. In what
concerns this, I regard crucial the understanding of the fact that
creation, as it mirrors (if claimed) most often the solipsism and the
authoritarian pride of the author of suspending both the past and the
future. And also, as the tradition is dialogically approached, it is not
with the purpose of privileging certain parts of it as more true than
others, that is, not in order to suppress its diversity and plurality of
values. If we do otherwise or if we as above discussed, fall into the
waters of solipsism. Santayana’s statement will immediately prove its
righteousness, as our project would be nothing but a slight variation
repeating the claim of classical metaphysics that single description of
the ultimate essence of things is possible.
The metaphysical myth of the
possibility of a " unique description" and a "final vocabulary" (Richard
Rorty) should in fact be left apart as a very premise of authentic
dialogue and self-correction. First, because the dialogical model as a
strategy results directly from accepting irreducible plurality and
difference: then, because even errors should be given the chance of
criticism and correction. So, the model that we get is one of multiple
values, based on pluralism, diversity and difference and guided by a
principles that confronts and interrelates several different aspects and
continuously creates new possibilities of connection. Indeed, the past
should not be a static load for our memory, but a material to activate and
interpret. If all experience and knowledge are human and therefore
contingent, multiple, irreducible, and increased mobility in their world
could be a major achievment, in this sense, the aim of recontestualization
proposed by Rorty could be understood as the name of a new horizon of
innovation opened: even if we can’t say the never-said, the once-said that
before was oppressing our need to innovate can become the material of our
personal interpretation, can be transfigured and assimilated by our own
world and premise of a personal, original project.
A net could be an adequate model of
this continous movement that keeps the past dynamic and fertile: the
coordinates of its points are given, but the possibility of a new
connections between them are illimited. Thus conceived, experience and
knowledge can no longer have authoritarian claims: in such a net, just as
in authentic democratic dialogue, having the last word is unconceivable,
because there is no such thing as last a world, a final configuration for
a society or a final political form. Everything is opened to criticism
and, as new connections and new contestualizations are always possible,
discussions will always bring up new solutions which themselves, when
tested or applied, will be open to improvement and correction. In this
manner, the authoritarian and highly non-democratic (but especially the
major totally illogical. The "logical of supplementarity" that Derrida
argued in the case of a test can be extended to everything that is part of
the human world: there are in everything points, zones that invite to
continuations, critics or even deconstruction, as a final unchangeable
state has become unconceivable.
Still, as the conditions and the
effects of remaining in touch with the past, have been above evaluated,
there is a certain point in which doubt could rise, corresponding to what
we usually call the conditions of possibility. That is the point in which
a relevant question appears: isn’t the condemnation to repetition
unavoidable? Caught in a highly sophisticated net of tradition, are we
really capable of innovation? Doesn’t everything just re-write itself,
never allowing the appearance of the new? If we could answer affirmatively,
we could place both the ones opened to dialogue and the indifferents under
the same sign of repetition, even if only in one case conscious. Still,
particular cases in which similar questions mainly with the same message
appeared may provide us with a perspective of the genuine depth of this
doubt: Derrida observing that Foucault has no choice but to write the
history of madness in the language of a rationalist modernity, or the end
of Man from within the conceptual frameworks of Man’s language. In a
similar manner, Heidegger argued against Neitzche’s claim of being a
post-metaphysical philosopher but still speaking its language in terms of
domination while discussing the will for power. As these attacks are
launched against highly revolutionary thinkers, they might make it worth
to question the cond itions of possibility of something that is
nonrepetitive.
When I discussed the paradigm of
knowledge that memory and dialogue imply and tried to argue against the
inhuman aim of creation ex nihilo, I might have set a possible ground
starting from which the doubt of unavoidable repetition could be replied.
That is, neither absolute repetition or absolute non-repetition are
possible (for the first one, we could take into account the splendid idea
of South-American writer Jorge Luis Borges of someone who rewrites, in the
twentieth century "Don Quijote" word by word, in exactly the same words,
but the result is a different test, another test). If impossible,
absolutely repetitive or non-repetitive projects are by no account
reasonable or desirable, and the aim of recontestualization which involves
both preservation and innovation might be the model that could provide us
with an acceptable answer for our initial doubt that everything just
repeats itself with the slight variations that are mainly rhetorical. This
model allows us to see the dialogue with the once-said as a departure
point for interpretative interventions that are part of a personal project.
Or, in Heideggerian terms, Schritt Zuruck and then sprung.
Up to now, we have seen that the kind
of rela tionship that memory as challenge to dialogue institutes with the
past has a doubte directions, two complementary and simultaneous senses:
the past continually provides the present with material to be
recontestualized, re-interpreted, with the lessons tha t are supposed to
improve the coping with contemporary problems. And on the other hand the
present never lets the past remain static, remain given, but is always
re-writing it from new perspectives, and thus saving it from the most
inhuman indifference that lies in denial of rootedness. AT this point, I
would like to conclusively gather the threads of my argumentation. I have
tried to show that, even though written almost aphoristically, Santayana’s
statement proposes true liberation from several forms of authoritarianism,
as it implies the subsidiary vision of the fallibility of human knowledge
and experience, of human judgement (whether on theoretical, moral,
political issues). The fallibility serves as the ground for democratic
dialogue, criticism, self-correction and the disponibility to harm from
our own errors, and it encourages a fertile dialogue with tradition that
excludes distructive attitudes towards it, but most of all manages to save
us from an epidemic of indifference (seen as letting the past falling into
oblivion or, as hyotard us, never "activating the differences) that would
be lethal for our humanity.
