A Sense of the Future

I was inspired to write this by the introductory essay in Lewis Lapham’s ambitious new periodical, Lapham's Quarterly, which is about "finding the present in the past, and the past in the present."

"Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past."

That may seem like a contradiction; it might seem that history has more to do with preserving the past while delaying or avoiding the future. Admittedly, this is often true: some people abuse history as an excuse to turn away from the present and the future -- the position criticised by Nietzsche in "The Use and Abuse of History."

So what about the use of history? Jacques Barzun answered this question with characteristic simplicity and directness: "The use of history is for the person." Obvious enough, but it's apparently easy to forget, perhaps especially in the education system.

Studying history is about educating oneself for the present and future, not just preserving or restoring the past. According to Barzun, history provides something that neither science or art can: an intuitive sense for "continuity in chaos... attainment in the heart of disorder... purpose." Science denies this sense, while "art only invents it."

You could argue that science does provide a sense of purpose, and that art provides it in a really genuine way as well, but consider that such ways are essentially historical. Science and art have histories (and biographies) like every other human endeavour; it is mainly through history and biography that they converge and become meaningful (or just useful) to living persons.

It might be difficult to recognize the importance of history in this regard because it’s so deeply involved in our habitual ways of thinking; we tend to take it for granted, calling it good old common sense, which demands no further elaboration.

If I read it correctly, Barzun’s argument is that history is common sense which has been educated and refined through conscientious research and composition; history is common sense becoming a more comprehensive "logic of events."

History is like science in that it involves discipline and produces falsifiable results; we can objectively evaluate the merits of historians and their works by checking their accordance with trustworthy facts and practices. But history is not as severely limited by methods and formulas as science. History foremost serves (and is served by) actively thinking minds.

We might say that all scientific and artistic achievements begin and end as history. All scientists and artists begin with some kind of common (or historical) sense – an "untaught knowledge of how the world goes"; when this sense is violated – by some fact or event that defies it – scientists and artists are moved to make an account of it. If the account is successful, then it will occupy a place in the history of human achievement; even after it is surpassed by later successes, even after it is proved false or has been replaced by other styles, it is still potentially useful as history.

This is perhaps most apparent in biographies of scientists and artists; history humanizes what may otherwise be inaccessible or uninteresting. History reassures us that Newton and Shakespeare didn’t come from some superhuman realm, bringing fully formed talents and infallible ideas without context; it reminds us that the great natural philosopher struggled through mistakes and self-doubt like anyone else might, and even the great poet owed as much to circumstances and history as he owed to intrinsic genius.

History helps us to associate and connect. Emerson described history as a record of the "works of universal mind" – a continuous intellectual enterprise – access to which is available to anyone who would "read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life in the text."

"What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand," and "all that is said of the wise man...describes to the reader his own idea, his unattained but attainable self."

The "unattained but attainable self" is the organ that both uses and makes history – or uses history to make history – to live more creatively and effectively.

People don’t merely live, we tend to live for something, or towards something. Many people (too many?) are content to live and work towards objects that already exist – acquiring prize possessions. Other people are compelled towards objects that don’t exist yet – opportunities to discover or create something new. Instead of pursuing existing objects, such people seek to fill gaps where they feel something could or should be (suggested by facts or events that defy common sense).

These "gaps" might take the form of scientific anomalies and inconsistencies, such as the theoretical differences between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity.

Michael Polanyi described scientific discoveries as beginning with "solitary intimations of a problem, of bits and pieces here and there which seem to offer clues to something hidden. They look like fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole... its content is undefinable, indeterminate, strictly personal."

There is at least one major problem that every person must face eventually: the future – or more specifically, who to become in the future.

We have a sense of who we might become, but it may be unclear and uncertain. In this way, Emerson’s "unattained but attainable self" is like Polanyi’s "unknown coherent whole." The future is a kind of problem (or opportunity) to be resolved and accounted for. Even those who "leave it to fate" by saying "whatever happens, happens," aren’t avoiding the problem; they merely resolve it in a lazy and uncreative way, by filling the gap with a dud.

In a way, such people actually aspire to be ineffective and out of control. They generate a passive ideal from their intuitive sense of life as having no purpose – or at least insufficient purpose for willing and responsible engagement – and this becomes their main assumption about life: their horizon of attainability stops at ineffectiveness (or helplessness).

But a more active and conscientious exposure to history, which goes beyond immediate experience and common sense, introduces many facts that contradict and challenge the notion of helplessness. History provides examples of great accomplishments and accounts of how they occurred, which invariable involve some combination of active attention and personal will.

These facts thus poke holes in idealizations of helplessness, creating new problems to be resolved, which hopefully lead to a more vivid sense of purpose: "How can you say that whatever happens, happens, when history demonstrates that what happens largely depends what people do?"

So history can be used to demonstrate that life means the purposeful act of living, not merely something given to passive recipients. As Barzun said, history’s use is to provide an intuitive sense of purpose, or "attainment in the heart of disorder."

José Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher who was obsessed with history, calls this notion of personal becoming a "vital project": "The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is – a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality." In other words, each person is "something which is not yet but aspires to be."

Steven Pinker has used these statements by Ortega as an example of the "blank slate" argument, which he opposes – and which I think Ortega would oppose too. Ortega was writing metaphorically; he was exaggerating to make an ambitiously metaphysical point about the creative aspect of humanity, which distinguishes us (without separating us) from the rest of nature.

Ortega compensated elsewhere by going too far in the other direction, suggesting that our aspirations and preferences are given to us, exaggerating the innate biological factors into an almost Platonic realm of "eternal" forms and ideals. Here’s an example, which somewhat demonstrates Ortega’s principle of a vital project:

"In the slumbering depth of the feminine soul, woman, when truly a woman, is always the sleeping beauty, waiting amid life’s forest to be awakened by the kiss of the prince. In the depth of her soul she bears, unknowing, the pre-formed image of a man – not an individual image of an individual man, but a generic type of masculine perfection. And, always asleep, she moves like a sleepwalker among the men she meets, contrasting their physical and moral figures with that of her pre-existent preferred model."

As you can see, Ortega wasn’t afraid to amplify some claims for literary (perhaps laughable) affect. As with Nietzsche, it is fairly easy to find a few quotes and phrases in his work to give colour to all kinds of radical positions, without bothering to read more deeply for his underlying message or purpose.

Now it strikes me that this itself is a demonstration of our relationship with the world, and thus our sense of the future. You can’t get a fair account of Ortega’s purpose from the few phrases that you might receive from people like me and Steven Pinker; neither can you get a fair account of life’s purpose from the few impressions you might happen to passively receive. We must continually work it out for ourselves.

Life presents a lot of information – far more than we could ever actually recognize and manage – from which we select only what interests us, or what concerns us, or what defies our existing knowledge, or what we feel is actually worth our attention. From these limited selections we compose an account of life.

As any decent scientist will tell you, the truest accounts tend to be generated from the largest and most diverse samples. A survey that carefully selects 100,000 people from a representative cross-section of society will be far more useful than a survey of subscribers to a special-interest magazine, or an arbitrary survey of people who happen to be walking through the local mall on a weekday.

As in science, an effort must be made to generate fair and diverse samples for our historical or common sense accounts of life. In some cases this calls for restraint, cutting off impressions that might be too biassed or unrepresentative; in other cases it means going out in search of new impressions to help fill in gaps – and studying history is one of the most effective ways to find more facts and impressions. Above all it involves active attention and personal will; care and conviction; discretion and aspiration; responsibility, respect, resourcefulness, and resolve.

The analogy with survey samples isn’t quite accurate: historians don’t actually use their entire "sample" the way statisticians do; even after a first round of selections have been made, there’s still far too much information to cope with, so some facts and impressions are selected again to be brought into the foreground of the account.

We do the same thing through common sense: the mind naturally selects some impressions for the foreground, tacitly ignoring the rest as peripheral. Even someone who possesses vast knowledge – a "broad sample" – doesn’t actually use much more knowledge in specific situations than someone who has much less to select from.

But a large supply of knowledge increases the quality and relevance of those few facts and impressions that can be used. Here a better analogy might be a person’s wardrobe: people with a lot of clothes don’t actually wear more at any given time; the benefit of a large wardrobe is to have just the right thing to wear for a specific occasion.

Another version of that analogy is that a person with more clothes is better able to incorporate new articles into their wardrobe:

"The more historical knowledge we have, the more we can learn from any given piece of evidence; if we had none, we could learn nothing."

So wrote R. G. Collingwood, another philosopher of history, who went on to claim that "historical thinking is an original and fundamental idea of the human mind" – something innate or a priori – "an idea which every man possesses as part of the furniture of his mind, and discovers himself to possess and in so far as he is conscious of what it is to have a mind."

For both Collingwood and Ortega, it isn’t just the past that compels us to study history, but the present and the future. For Collingwood, the study of history begins here and now – or at least we begin by "using the present as evidence for its own past... and any imaginative reconstruction of the past aims at reconstructing the past of this present, the present in which the act of imagination is going on, in which the here-and-now is perceived."

Ortega goes farther, claiming that "life is an activity executed in relation to the future; we find the present or the past afterwards, in relation to that future." More specifically, "it is when I find in the past the means of realizing my future that I discover my present."

Returning to the wardrobe analogy, imagine finding a great new pair of shoes (or a jacket, or a hat, or suspenders, or whatever) – they seem to be what you’ve always been looking for. But before making your purchase, you’ve got to think back to what you already have in the closet that might match. If you don’t possess anything that works with those green shoes or pink suspenders, then you lack "the means of realizing your future," and the present transaction comes to an end.

Remember that I began this essay with a quote from Lewis Lapham about "defending the future against the past." By claiming the past is something we need to defend against, I take it he’s referring to ideas and habits we inherit blindly – the rigid conventions, misleading assumptions, outmoded methods, and ungenerative ideals that promote ignorance, passivity, and helplessness.

These ideas probably exist (and persist) because they’ve been useful: at some time they served a purpose, or helped people find "attainment in the heart of disorder." But ideas, like everything else, have limited lives; eventually they need to be managed, updated, or replaced.

When ideas persist beyond their original purpose, they don’t just become useless, they become worse than useless: they're an additional burden or constraint, making it even more difficult to make sense of present problems and opportunities.

Arguing this point, Ortega wrote that we grow into a "network of ready-made solutions" before we’re even aware of the problems they’re supposed to solve. As a result, "when we come to feel actual distress in the face of a vital question, and we really want to find its solution... not only must we struggle with the problem, but we find ourselves caught within the solutions previously received and must also struggle with them."

The best way to avoid this may be to study history: to appreciate our inheritance, and to begin to understand the complex ways in which ideas and conventions have evolved.

Earlier in his career (much earlier), Barzun wrote that history’s greatest weakness, "its uncertainty and inability to put things into neat bundles," was also its greatest strength, "its great advantage over ready-made systems." History keeps thinking alive: "Its difficulties force the student’s gaze to discern in each event and person its unique character, to mark and remember its own shape. It is a discipline that strengthens individual judgement and keeps bright the points that connect imagination with present reality."

Emerson, as we might expect, was much more poetic in expressing this need:

"What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man."

That "light by which man is truly man" is the sense of life’s incompleteness; it selects and brings into the foreground those "solitary intimations of a problem... fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole," a compelling mystery which we call the future.

Notes:

This essay is dedicated to Jacques Barzun (presuming this is worthy of such a dedication), whose 100th birthday is tommorrow: Nov. 30, 2007.

If I hadn't arbitrarily bought A Stroll with William James in a used bookstore two summers ago (and then spotted The Modern Researcher a few days after that, and A Jacques Barzun Reader hours later) I would never have found the proper discipline or encouragement to write.

I highly recommend learning more about Jacques Barzun's work. Here's the Wikipedia entry, with links... a recent New Yorker article... and... and... more... a site and blog dedicated to his 100th... and another site.

Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence is amazing... A Jacques Barzun Reader touches on most of his essential points... Simple & Direct and The Modern Researcher are invaluable... and that's just a beginning...

Quotes in this essay are from: Barzun, Clio and the Doctors and Of Human Freedom; Collingwood, The Historical Imagination; Emerson, "History"; Lapham, "The Gulf of Time" in Lapham's Quarterly, Winter 2008; Ortega, History as a System, What is Philosophy?, and Man and Crisis; Polanyi, Meaning.

Don't hesitate to ask questions or comment by email: bd.frank@gmail.com.