vineri, 30 septembrie 2011

About Historical Facts

We did not know how we can come close to the things, but there is an easier task to point to the ways that move us farther from them.

One of this ways is the appeal to historical facts for explaining actual state of facts.

For instance, if we have to explain an ever actual fact as death and we take into account the views of death supported by ancient peoples, then, in spite of the necessity of such an account, we risk to abandon it as a current issue. First of all, for the death becomes the object of a discourse. Seeing that others interpreted it, we just follow them as new interpreters, but we forget to see it as something that is closer than any object of interpretation.

And if we conceive ourselves as interpreters of a fact, then we feel that our task related to the fact is that of speaking about it.

Even if there is not possible a tabula rasa from which there would be erased any past interpretations of the things we meet at present, one norm for advancing closer to things should be that of not appeal to historical facts as arguments for our actual beliefs. And it does not matter if those facts are refuted, or gathered for supporting our beliefs.