My answer is that history is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
The historian’s business is with fact; and there are no future facts. The whole past and present universe is the field of history, to its remotest parts and in its most distant beginnings. Over this field the historian is absolutely free to range in whatever direction he will, limited not by his ‘authorities’ but by his own pleasure. For the maturity of historical thought is the explicit consciousness of the truth that what matters is not an historian’s sources but the use he makes of them.
PROP. 1. Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.
But we don’t expect our presidents to be ideal humans touched by a divine hand, like the biblical Moses. We don’t want our presidents to be perfect—most important, we don’t want them to consider themselves perfect. As we’ve already seen, Americans have strong apprehensions about perfection. We are culturally adolescent, and we expect our president to be adolescent as well. We expect him to be connected to the American soul, and that means rarely doing things right the first time. Instead, we expect him to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and be better for it. Clinton’s presidency was riddled with mistakes (from the botched national health plan to Whitewater to the Monica Lewinsky scandal), but, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, his approval ratings at the end of his second term were higher than those of any post–World War II president, including Ronald Reagan.
What is a highly adaptive society? It is a nation-state that has acquired and developed a stable set of five key institutions: a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.
The history of philosophy transpired in this two-limbed kind of development in both Greece and India, despite the modern idea that Greek thinkers were primarily realistic and logical, while Indian thought was supposedly limited to transcendentalist and intuitive modes. In fact, neither of these ancient cultures was as limited as that. The Greeks quite as much as the Indians had philosophical schools with mystical and transcendentalist orientations; conversely, the various trends of pluralism, naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, and protoscientific rationalism unfolded in the Indian schools as well as in the Greek.
There are other subjects that are well seen in terms of the gradual coming to explicitness of implicit knowledge. The point of view of Auerbach’s Mimesis, for example, is that much of the history of literature consists in a gradual colonizing of human experience of life, both inner and outer, as a possible subject for literary treatment. Ancient literature, for example, was able to represent the life of ordinary people only in the comic mode, but later literature gradually learned to express the heroic and tragic in ordinary life.
Conservatism is a struggle for tradition in both senses: a taxing search for what to preserve amid the creative destruction of capitalism, and a fight among conservatives for ownership of their common tradition.
For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality.
