Photo by Eduardo Olszewski
I am currently reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance and find myself agreeing with his holistic postulate that we sympathize with historical events because we see can readily ourselves in them as 1st person. He states that the key in self-reliance is to understand that all of history is within us. We are the abolitionists, the conquerors and the fascists. History is not composed of men to be distanced from self and put on a pedestal, it is just a cumulative yet minute manifestation of accessible states that are within each and every one of us. Not only is history a cumulation of decisions acted upon thoughts that we all think, every present decision we make is an accessible state that allows us to continue to write history as equals to all those who came before us. We think every thought that has been thought and feel everything that has ever been felt. In essence, history is just a manifestation of finite human entropy, identical within all of us.
Now, I intentionally mentioned human entropy as finite in my last sentence because I daringly extrapolate that if history is just the manifestation of finite states common to all of us, then there must be some objective superset of knowledge/entropy from where we are accessing these states. If each one of us were dually creating and accessing states, I fail to rationalize how the grouping of these states could be common to all of us. Building off my previous post “The collage of ego”, perhaps I could stretch my original argument from that post to state that there may actually be an objective or encompassing body of knowledge within each of us from which, what each one of us “knows” is simply a fragmentally accessed state via either introspection or environmental influence.
Although this argument does lend itself to the existence of an absolute truth, I feel the notion of each of us being complete mini-universes lends more optimism the harsher reality that until dissolved, our ego and intertwined sense of self claims its identity off nothing more than fragmented bits of accessed states.