Virtue by association

 

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IT IS A GLOOMY FACT that the outsider has been assigned to be the interpreter of our world.

Perplexed we are in this situation. So very often the major literary works are written by people, men or women, that scarcely participate in ordinary life at all. They are outsiders, people on STAND-BY. And the truth about our civilization still has been seen as THEIR task to interpret.

WHY IS THAT?

TRUE enough that you, in SOME SENSE, have to look at things at some distance to be able to discern the determining features, but the great amount of people, that actually never have been part of society, that has managed to be the depicters of this society is stunning.

We might narrow the scope, for just one moment.

AMONG those who have indulged in writing Cultural History, History of Ideas, and the like, i.e. persons like Giambattista Vico, Johann von Herder, Burchardt, Nietzsche, ( Hegel ), Egon Friedell, Oswald Spengler, Weber and many modern Meta-Historians; we might perceive one common trait. They are almost all of them singular personalities, eremites, drop-outs from high school, - that is: they are complete outsiders, often autodidacts with poor upbringing, never quite renowned or accepted by society.

STILL, they are the ones who had made it in this important field of interpretation. The eccentric drop-outs, the bullied and scorned, THEY have had the privilege of given ordinary people the MIRROR of ANCIENT and CONTEMPORARY CULTURE.

HOW IS THAT?

In many cases it is quite clear that the writers of Cultural History never even themselves took their work seriously, but considered it an act of dfespair.

STILL their works have had an ENORMOUS IMPACT on history and politics and on the debate and on the Self-Consciousness of several modern epochs in several parts of the western world.

 

ONE COMMON FEATURE by these authors of meta-history is the careless handling of MYTH.

With MYTH it is so, that if you refer to a myth, you are no longer yourself RESPONSIBLE. It is NOT YOU that is talking. It is THE MYTH.

Perhaps it was formerly, when academic education very much was based upon knowledge of Greek and Latin culture not only a natural thing to draw upon myth, but also a cunning method to – so to say – acquire certain virtue by association. If something drew upon a myth, and thus was associated with  myth, it was at the same time not perhaps entirely true, but it inevitably had, due to its origin, a big portion of truth also, - so called: historical truth.

 

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