Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 16:16:23 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Paradox, Protagoras and History


Steve wrote,

>The light dawns. Yes in that sense you are right - when I reread this I
missed this >possible interpretation. Reading your comments below I surmise
that you are >reading 'history' as something immanent and/or ineffable -
which is not the intention. >History like everyday life is an area of
struggle, an experimental activity much like >philosophy and politics.

IMHO, as I've written before, History is ideas that exist in living tissue,
and is part of the life of those who recollect and ponder.

Personal history is based on memory and artifacts.  Communicated history is
based on artifacts, mostly words.

Words, in spite of  great difficulties, which Lyotard describes, communicate
ideas of living persons, but most of the important ideas of the world we
live in probably originated in the minds of historical persons who, long
ago, transmitted them to others as speech or texts.

>Oh and Marx like myself was an atheist - I'd be rather amused if you
assigned my >socio-cultural background to, over simply,  some
culturally/mythical god or other. >True to say 70% of the inhabitamts of
europe currently believe in some god or >other but then 15% of them believe
the world is flat.

Kant and Hegel seem to have been believers in a real god, not a
culturally/mythical
god.

Marx would have been about 30 years old when Darwin's theories were
published.  Perhaps he, and/or his disciples,  went the cultural/mythical
route, adopting History as a god-substitute.

Destroy one belief, like flat-earth and new ones arrive.  Destroy God as
Creator, and new theories such as "Nature" , "Life", "Self-Generation",
"Emergence"
arrive, happen, and are appropriated as elements of indvidual belief
systems.

Cheers,

Hugh