HISTORY AND ACTION (en)

Any historical account is bound to be a lie of omission, as no account can contain everything, and yet I have a hard time imagining any actions that I don’t base on interpolation of the past into the future - from gravity to politics - I operate as if my view of the past was at least partially true. I live between the simplified version of the world required to be able to take action and the complex knowledge of the fallacy of my own assumptions. This tension between necessary simplification and acknowledged complexity echoes through Western philosophy: from Heraclitus’s recognition that we never step in the same river twice, through Nietzsche’s questioning of historical truth, to pragmatists like William James wrestling with how provisional truths enable action. The challenge they all faced, and we still face today, lies not just in recognizing this paradox, but in developing frameworks that allow us to move from complex and nuanced understanding to actionable knowledge and categories without losing sight of the richness of paradox we’ve had to temporarily set aside.