"BERLIN, July 20, 1848.--It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to
judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from
the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of
astronomy. When the duration of a man’s life or of a people’s life appears to
us as microscopic as that of a fly and inversely, the life of a gnat as
infinite as that of a celestial body, with all its dust of nations, we feel
ourselves at once very small and very great, and we are able, as it were, to
survey from the height of the spheres our own existence, and the little
whirlwinds which agitate our little Europe.
"At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of
mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us
back to this study."
-- The Second Published Entry of the Intimate Journal of Henri-Frédéric
Amiel
---
To study studies of extant phenomena from bygone ages supplies many avenues for
investigation. In the present, it implicitly supplies the priorities of the
authors and the content which precedes other facts of the age studied. For the
epochs studied, there is a modicum of a posteriori fitness or hygiene in some
sense to be teased out.
This last point in and of itself needs broader explication.
When there is talk about losers within history, the term loser must be
qualified. Namely, losers are invariably extant losers, or rather the players
*currently* losing. By virtue of existing in some capacity, they are players
still in the game, even if only what only remains is a fading record.
What do I mean by this? Take genocide as an example: any genocide that can be
spoken about was by definition not successful. Any conception of successful
genocide must *exclude* existence of the people destroyed. If there is a record
of the people being killed, then genocide has not occurred, as the people still
exist in some capacity in reality such that "genocide" can be recognized.
A successful genocide, true extinction, leaves no trace. It is an erasure; an
obliteration. A palimpsest left behind is the clearest evidence of failure.
When dialogues come up concerning the losers of history, oppression,
etc. earnest attention must be paid within this context: the true losers of
history, the true oppressed *do not* exist within dialogues at any level.
They are by definition invisible and cannot be talked about.
