Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Opinion 36

Lukacs on why history is how our minds work:

Scientific knowledge, dependent as it is on scientific method, is by its nature open to question. The existence of historical knowledge, the inevitable presence of the past in our minds, is not. We are all historians by nature, while we are scientists only by choice...The past in our minds is memory. Human beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that is entirely new. (The Greek word for "truth", aletheia, also means: "not forgetting.") "There is not a vestiage of real creativity de novo in us," C.S. Lewis once wrote. No one can even imagine an entirely new color; or an entirely new animal; or even a third sex. At best (or worst) one can imagine a new combination of already exisiting - that is, known to us - colors, or monsters, or sexes.

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