There’s a certain magical attachment in the histories we
read in books – or the magazines, or the newspapers, doing their own kind of fashion
work, articulating the spirit of the age as the well to do see it - to years. A
year serves not only as an organizing principle, but also as a spell – it
gathers around itself a host of connotations, and soon comes to stand for those
connotations. Yet, what would history be like if you knocked out the years,
days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense,
philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of
chronology as accidents of historical structure. These are the crutches of the
historian, according to the philosophical historian. Instead, a philosophical
history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of
history. In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a
before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that
arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a
limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side
of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of
labeling founded on the arbitrary, and ultimately, on the fear of time itself,
that deathdealer.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
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