Finality

As more as we go into detail with scientific investigations we are running towards a point of statis, transcending reality to the extent to which we are missing out the actual relationships that are characterising “being”. These are disregarded in much of the actual work.
It is interesting to look at the work and conversation of and between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. Although we usually do not consider this as question of methodology, it is highly relevant that both emphasise the importance of movement, as matter of liberatiing thinking and ideas on the one hand, furthermore the emphasis by Alexander von Humboldt that traveling in actual effect allows to be immediately confronted not only with distance but at the same time with the connections between the different things.
Also Alexander von Humboldt states ‘If one travels through 100 miles of earth in a few weeks, the law becomes clear’.
However, this may open road to a paradox: Goethe, somewhere in the west-eastern divan, emphasisis that the ‘experience’ of 3,000 years is necessary to actually understand the world.

Three thousand years, a personal visit in Rome where I had been speaking on a conference on the diversity of modernisation, i had been confronted with being in the situation of actually living through even more than 3000 years: ancient history and even the ‘prehistoric times’ but as well the more recent histories – manifestations as the Forum Romanum, the villa of Mussolini, street names reminding of popes, politicians relevant during my own lifetime … and the personal history: having lived and worked there for some time, my modest domicile in the via della Musa, just around the corner of the villa of ‘il duce’, the office nearby, the “foundation library””” at EURISPES – there, though more hidden than really public -; occasionally the smell from a pasticeria, the cafè et cornetto, and the many reminders of personal life somewhere: the Korean signs, reminding me of the Melancholic Chanson I once received, handwritten with love;

the gelateria next to the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, where Chen and Lv enjoyed ice cream, the Basilica Papale di Santa Maria Maggiore, where the friendship to Simona commenced; the now “empty” junction in front of the main station: the two old ladies, sleeping rough and … well, call it messed around, commented by my then landlady by the question: why do you always see the nasty things …. yes, all this is in some way making history: living, learning, loving, loosing …

A few days, from ancient times to personal presence …. it seems that the concentration and condensation of history actually makes it fading away, becoming meaningless. Moreover, it is not just history as we commonly understand it, but it is time in general and even in its own way reality becoming meaningless. Who would not be reminded of or even feel like Raymond Fosca, whom we know from Simone de Beauvoir’s outstanding work Tous les hommes sont mortels …. and for the one who is not, the loss of time results in the loss of relevance of life.

Et puis vous m’avez ouvert les yeux. Elle cacha son visage dans ses mains. Un brin d’herbe, rien qu’un brin d’herbe. Chacun se voyait différent des autres; chacun se préférait; et tous se trompaient; elle s’était trompée comme les autres.

Reality becomes somewhat arbitrary, random, autopoitically self-controlled – history can sold – in tourist shops, often by Asians who left there own history behind – in some respect it reminds me of having talked to Wendy from Australia many years ago: she envied me as European, with the wealth of a cultural heritage. I could only answer: The Australians killed their history, genociding the aborigines – and the Australians who acted murderous had been in fact Europeans …
Selling history, killing history … and forgetting to make history as it is easier to send links instead ot talking … history from the self-service shop with the finished products …

Standing on the shoulder of giants? Or allowing them to cover us with dust?

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In the documentary An der Unstrut we hear a shepherd saying:

“Indifference bothers me, unpunctuality bothers me. And it bothers me when people always believe that everything has to be like that and don’t even think that something has to be done for it in daily life. That bothers me. And going through life so lala, so unstable…I don’t like that. I have to know that when I finish work at night, I have to be sure that the day has brought something. Living like this… living like this annoys me. When people think that everything that happens here today is so self-evident. That bothers me. When I think back… Everything used to be difficult until then. Many have forgotten that. That upsets me.”