Article #13: Is there any value in the Past?
Objection 1: It seems there is little value to the past because opportunity for action lies in the present. Since we cannot act in the past, and our purpose is to act rightly in this world, our focus should be on the present. The past holds lessons and data from which we may draw as required to meet our current needs, but the value of the past is defined only by its usefulness to the present and future. Any other nostalgia is distracting and wasteful.
Objection 2: Furthermore, the Stoics inform us that the past is beyond our control. The wise person only focuses on what they can control and avoids what they cannot. Therefore the past merits little attention as we cannot affect it.
Objection 3: From Aristotle we learn that past-tense demonstrative rhetoric is often used to find and place blame. Trauma, regret, shame, and loss stem from the past, making it fertile ground for determining blame and punishing others or ourselves. The past-tense cannot talk about values and action now nor how to plan for choices to be made in the future.
On the contrary, to deny the past value is to deny ourselves of value, since we are who we are because of the past. Viktor Frankl, the great Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning writes of the past as a balm and the source of a meaningful life. The past is a vault wherein all our “good deeds done, the loves loved…the sufferings borne with courage and dignity,” are all safely delivered and deposited. The past safely stores all the actualized meaning of our lives. All we have to do is remember.
“From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past — the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized – and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”
I answer that the past is valuable beyond its practical utility for the present. It is worthy of love and affection if one has acted well. A man may be said to have a valuable past that has stored up assets and realities in it that he may draw upon at any time and especially when present or future challenges and uncertainties disrupt, either for himself or his family. The end result of living well is to have a past worth admiring – a portable yet inviolable abiding stock of strength.
Reply to Objection 1: As Nietzsche says: The past ought to serve the living.1 Both the personal and collective past hold experiences and lessons for inspiring courage and right action in the present. This is necessary to build a meaningful life. In fact, without learning from the past, each person would be left to his own ability to, at best, rediscover in their short life-span the wisdom of generations, or at worst, would be left to grope in the darkness of ignorance.
Reply to Objection 2: As the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius said, Remember withal through how many things thou hast already passed, and how many thou hast been able to endure; so that now the legend of thy life is full, and thy charge is accomplished.2 He reflects upon his memories of people and experiences that have shaped his character, enabling him to fulfill his philosophic and public duties with virtue. Further, throughout his stoic meditations he repeatedly exhorts himself to ‘remember’, to employ the past to guide his present and the actions and thoughts over which he did have control. If the past were not valuable to him, there would be no value in his remembering anything from it.
Reply to Objection 3: Past-tense rhetoric can also be used to form bonds, to draw people together to a common story. This is the role of a collective memory bank called tradition. The young have no personal past from which to draw strength. Therefore the codified stories and values of the noble deeds and sayings of predecessors, stored and redeposited in the past, act to serve the good of the community. The past holds sources of pain but also examples of how to act and confront our pain and find the meaning in it.
I’ve been reading some Thomas Aquinas lately and I thought it might be fun to layout this idea in a Summa Theologiae-ish style. What I appreciate so much about the scholastic approach is its respect for and approach towards opposing ideas. Scholastic work, like the kind Thomas writes in his big Summa, is the epitome of “Steel-manning” the opponent, or saying their arguments better than they can say it. Then they take the multiple objections one by one and refute them, “showing their work” so-to-speak as they go.
I’m not a scholastic per-say but this was a fun exercise. I found that organizing my thoughts this way on a controversial topic helped me think through my ideas better. Though it’s not the juiciest thing to read, I recommend this exercise for working through ideas, even if you don’t publish them. Finding clarity is a good!
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From On The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. ↩︎
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From https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2680/pg2680-images.html ↩︎