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Today, I wanna dedicate the whole page to elaborate on the idea that the past is like a forest where we have to go to dig out some treasure. Peterson, in the lecture that we watched today, talked about nature and culture as if they were our symbolic parents. According to him, to become a “real” person, one has to find meaning in the past of his culture relevant to his nature and bring it to the present. It reminds me of Marx, who looks into the past, sees the class struggle between the oppressed and oppressors, takes the side of the former and writes “Das Capital”, hoping to make things better in the future. Or Darwin, who looks even deeper into the past, sees natural selection and makes an attempt to prove that nature does not need super-intelligence to transform chimps into human beings. Or Kant, who goes beyond all limits, sees time as a purely psychological construct and writes the Critique of Pure Reason to show that the entire world of appearance is just an illusion. Or Shakespeare, who sees in the past an interplay of different characters and brilliantly describes it in a poetic language. Or…
I like the idea that the past is infinite and may be shaped in an infinite number of ways. And I also like the idea that, even if it’s infinite, it nevertheless meets the future on its way to nowhere.
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