RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

It was thus, ever and...

It was thus, ever and ever

Ian Glendinning blogs on my exchange with Dr. Weinberger about philosopher Richard Rorty, point to Richard Barrett's work:

I've blogged several times "It was ever thus" and "Nothing new under the sun" over the years, most recently in connection with US Philosopher William Barrett.

Even more interestingly, Barrett makes the very point - in the concluding chapter "The Place of the Furies" of his "Irrational Man" - that recognising that it was ever thus is as old as philosophy itself, quoting Karl Jaspers, citing an anonymous 4000 year old Egyptian philosopher and Ortega y Gasset citing the Latin Poet Horace. Current issues always look more problematic than the problems of our ancestors, but they were always pretty much the same problems.

I haven't read much Barrett, but Ortega y Gasset has long been a favorite of mine. One can find all sorts of tools for dealing with new problems in history, if only you let go of the conceit that you're inventing everything. I tell my kids this all the time, when they are banging their heads against experience that is easily borrowed and improved upon.

We'd do well to recognize we are all children in the long run. Better than just being dead, because it leaves your whole life in front of you and millennia of history to parent you through it all.