The History as Patrimony of Mankind
I would like to detain me for an instant on which meaning the study of history
has history. Since the times of the school, I remember the definition of history
as tool for knowing and understanding the past of the man and with it avoiding
the committed errors. Also considering such conception in extreme measure as sustainable,
I think that it confine to give of the phenomenon “history” a purely
instrumental vision. With this, I intend to sustain that living in a world purely
turned to the technical aspect of our being it was inevitable that also in this
branch of the human knowledge a material finality was sought, in the specific,
the possibility to avoid the past errors. I have noticed the same deformation
for that that it concerns the study of literary, where it wants to reduce everything
to the grammatical and lexical knowledge of the literal work.
Well, I would like to go against this stream. I would like to affirm the validity
of a historical study of the human past in its ontological aspect and not in its
finalism. Studying the history for studying the history has not to seem a contradiction.
As it can be affirmed to like reading a poetry of Leopardi or Wordsworth, so it
doesn't have to appear out of reality to say that the comprehension of a historical
period, at least for the little that can be gotten being neutral observatories
that have not lived it directly, can arouse equal feelings of satisfaction without
having to add nothing more to the activity in itself.
Certainly, there can be parallel motivations that can go from the personnel
one (passion, curiosity, pure thirst of knowledge) to the professional one (teaching,
research, publication) that, however, they would not have to darken the leading
essence of this humanistic science (I will subsequently explain to you this presumed
dichotomy) and that is to possess a really intrinsic value apart from everything
else this is to say to belong to the human thought. If my reflections can seem
you obscure, I will look for explaining them better. Being philosophy, par excellence,
the subject that studies the transcendent being of the man it is undeniable that
the human being is not only spirit. The presence of material and spiritual essence
in us is also by now undeniable (except for the tireless supporters of the materialism,
with its deleterious degenerations also in historical field). Well, if we understand
this there has to be a discipline that is dealt with our terrestrial part and
I believe that it can be sought afr in history. And here it returns in game the
definition that I have given few above: humanistic science. Science because bearer
of its own canons and its own unshakable dogmas (fixity of the events, publicity
and universality of the results), but contemporarily humanistic because history
does not pretend to be only one (that of the winners, according to a modern stereotype).
It can be interpreted, criticized, submitted to more or less ample revisions.
Also in front of the finished fact, whatever it is, from the battle to the betrayal,
from the discovery to the pestilences, each of us can give an own version of it,
seeking the reasons of it and really in the moment in which we believe of having
found them, here there someone that takes up completely opposite positions. In
conclusion, you could ask indeed if the history can serve to avoid our past errors
or also to any other thing.
And I would respond: and the philosophy, the poetry, the painting, the sculpture,
the song, the writing itself? Do they have a vae for themselves? Yes. It is not
an absolute answer, but related to my person. All the arts (or humanistic sciences
if you use this definition) are the reflex of the human doubleness and they have
as such an inestimable value. History is the attempt to understand what the man,
understood as mortal being, has completed during his existence on the Earth and
if it is true that the human actions are not anything else other than the reflex
of spiritual side that there is in us, here that the history will become a kind
of collective psychoanalysis to the search of the Ich of the humanity. If this
seems you a too great expectation for the subject, I won't try to convince you
over, it always remains the fact that with all the attempts that have been done
to forget some periods of our existence as conscious race, we have always returned
on our footsteps, picking up every shred of memory and transforming it in a precious
wedge of that large puzzles that is the past. Grant me a last word. In the title,
you have read tt the history is patrimony of the man. Not in the sense that the
history (existence) is our only peculiarity. Even ours dear, old and sick Earth
possesses one of it. Contrarily, I intended to say that it is a value for the
human being, part of what it makes him such. Nobody can deny being what it is
and what he completes; therefore, the man is synthesized in the transcendent one
and in the immanent one, in philosophy and history.
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