LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
The Demise of Historical Man
The
holtlO hisforiCIIs
I'm
talking about is a modern invention, more ex–
actly, an inner reaction against modernity.
It
has been said many times
that being human and non historical is inconceivable; that a mankind
robbed of historical consciousness is a monstrosity, perhaps a self-contra–
dictory concept, and that collective memory as it was crystallized in his–
torical knowledge is not only a necessary condition but the very
foundation of our self-identity as beings that live in a human, that is
communal, way. This commonplace is hardly controversial, but our
historical orientation in this obvious sense does not make us historical
men in the modern meaning. People have always been interested in their
collective past, of course; they have always needed - as a tribe, a nation,
a religious community - a mythological foundation for existence,
whereby they both knew the origin of the world in which they lived
and grasped its sense .
History, meant as the knowledge of origins, was functionally
mythological, no matter in what proportions in the narration truth and
fiction were mixed. What did matter was the awareness of self-ground–
ing, of the legitimacy - established at the beginning of time - of people's
collective existence. Mytho logical history provided people not only with
an interesting explanation of their provenance but, moreover, with the
principle of legitimacy and therefore with the meaning of present life, a
meaning that was set up and defined, so to say, at the source of being.
The grounding fact was not just a fact, not an accidental event that as
well could have not happened; the fact carried its own necessity, and in
this sense it was timeless or taken out of factual temporality.
This archaic historicity, this habit of relating one's own life to a
validity-giving, absolute and petrified beginning, was indispensable for
societies of which the distinctive characteristic was what Edward Shils
calls "primordiality," societies bound together by their supposed common
ancestry; the belonging to a tribe is defined by "blood," by roots in the
same, more or less legendary, past where all individual genealogies
ultimately converge. An analogous, albeit not identical, self-definition by
participation in a common ly owned past is to be found in religious
communities, including the so-called universal religions that are not lim–
ited by ethnic bonds.
It
is not kinship by blood but by a spirit that de–
cides about the belonging, and this kinship is defined historically; by tak–
ing part in the same holy history that goes back to the founding events,
