E LAW - MURDOCH UNIVERSITY ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF LAW ISSN 1321-8247 Volume 11 Number 2 (June 2004) Copyright E Law and author ftp://law.murdoch.edu.au/pub/elaw-issues/v11n2/ressel112.txt http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v11n2/ressel112.html ________________________________________________________________________ Justice against Objectivity for Nietzsche’s Modern Man; Or, The Efficient Causes of Modernity James Ressel Birkbeck College Contents * Introduction * “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life “ * Forgetting * Forgetting and Lies * The plastic force as the limit of forgetting * Where of Justice? * Notes Introduction 1. First I offer a "health warning": This paper does not claim to offer a global survey of Nietzschean themes or even a carefully analytical dissection of primary and secondary material, rather it attempts to present what may, with some justification, be called speculative and subjective response to one essay. Yet we may ask, what is the meaning of objectivity for the scholarly community, if not a sign, an outcrop or manifestation of shared consensus unique to that particular community. Signs often have a bad habit of becoming immutable laws guaranteeing a particular outcome, becoming the force or violence of ‘rational necessity’. As Nietzsche puts it better in the essay being discussed here, "if every event is the victory of the logical or the 'Idea', then get down quickly now and kneel down before the entire hierarchy of 'success.'"[1] 2. In other words, Nietzsche suggests that to detriment of thinking we become enmeshed in the systematic march of logic. The way forward is neither the dialectic, logically a manifestation of logic, nor some sort of reconciliation or compromise between ideas. Rather we should accept as necessary condition the requirement that for the existence of a concept, such as justice or , for example, we must also recognise accept the existence of un-justice or un-history, “the right of what is to come into being” the commonality of understanding. Nietzsche borrows and develops the notion of the co-dependence of apparently contradictory concepts from Heraclitus.[2] From this follows that our idealised heroic conception of ‘justice’ can never be objective and certainly never an “Idea”. 3. Against this background, this paper attempts to respond to the excitement of Nietzsche’s methodology of the non-heroic. The heroic code, according to Kahn, is founded on a duality of speech and action manifest as competition for human excellence. The duality implies an objective judgment and punishment outside the pure terms of heroic competition, for how else would we know what is right and wrong? The consequence of this is that we automatically privilege “the ‘competitive’ excellences” over “the more ‘cooperative’ virtues”.[3] 4. Nietzsche seeks to overcome the problem of duality and consequently deal with the resistance of the objective. Hence, on his terms, a non-scholastic approach to reading Nietzsche may offer fresh perspective. Or as Heraclitus put it “He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored”.[4] “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life “ 5. In this note I want to consider some themes from Nietzsche’s little known, but if one is generous a wide ranging essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life “ (1873).[5] The essay is a critique, even though for Nietzsche criticism amounts to a ‘weakness’ of character presumably because it means that inevitably he has to adopt and thus legitimate the Hegelian lexicon, of the German historical culture, which is “really a kind of congenital grey haired condition…the old age of humanity” consisting, according to Nietzsche of “looking back, tallying of accounts, balancing the books, seeing consolation in what used to be thought memories, in short, a historical culture” and more particularly of Hegel’s notion of the inevitable force or power of history. 6. He takes issue with Hegel’s idea of history as the idealised ‘last judgment’ reducing Hegelian history, in his language, both rudely and succinctly to Hegel’s personal existence: “for Hegel the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin” amounting to no more that “idolatrous worship of the factual”. He sets out to defeat the ‘factual’ with life, in other words an objective all-inclusive explanation, the completeness of a scientific ‘system’[6] or process. As Levinas notes because “this is the inclusive system, with nothing beyond, there is no appeal from this judgment. It is final….History itself is the final judge of history”.[7] 7. However, notwithstanding their quarrel, some parts of the essay attracted my attention because at certain points he briefly touches on the relationship between modernity, objectivity, knowledge, truth and justice in a manner indicating potentially a fruitful departure point. 8. Although in later writings he proposes social models, largely undemocratic and based on violent hierarchical systems of authority, he is not known for developing any useful conceptions of justice. This could be simply because such models predicated on power and vitality of life forces are necessarily unthinking a-historical and thus unidirectional - facing the future of its own face. 9. With prescience relevant to contemporary events, and adopting Goethe’s principle that instruction without vitality is worthless, he sets out to examine the value of history in culture.[8] He observes that we can be afflicted with history “suffering from consumptive historical fever”. Although, chronologically, he was writing in Germany at the end of 19th century that is at the peak of German empire and before its termination following WW1, his feeling that we require history for “life and action, not for comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act” chimes with for example the idea of pre-emptive strike or regime change, where history as life of the ‘target’ nation is buried, often literally, by ‘comfortable’ history used as a gloss for cowardly bad acts. Thus life, action emancipation, morality and justice can be said to be expressed in Nietzsche’s sense of history. The ‘goodness’ is set by our life and action and not necessarily, perhaps only a masochistically pleasurable appreciation of moral sin from self-flagellation. Goodness comes from having found the right balance between the history and unhistory. 10. With ‘just’ historical irony, for a man who had spent much of his life ill, Nietzsche adopts Goethe’s admiration for vitality, the Dionysian worship of the good man as physically embodied. The exuberance or even the disregard and deliberately unknowing lack of a logic ‘normally’ used to limit and control vitality, energy, and movement comes to the fore. Transition, as passage from one stage to another necessarily involves a movement though time and thus requires the ‘service of history’, but on one level, at least vitality requires to be unthinking and instinctual, natural action to overwhelm resignation attended by bodily ‘weakness’ induced by the oppressive weight of the Ideal. 11. However, for Nietzsche weak personality is not a biological weakness but a weakness caused by fear of Life. The source of the fear lays in our submission to the power of the objective/subjective dichotomy[9] the subjugation of the inner to memories so that we become merely “wandering encyclopaedias”. Simple, unthinking accumulation of memories from chronological past allows us to measure and prove in a scientific manner but fails to afford knowledge of reality or existence. Understanding cannot only be constituted by a chronological accumulation of empirically ‘uncovered’ pure and objective knowledge. This is because knowledge cannot be a Terra Nova, a certain kind of fixed external quantity waiting to be ‘discovered’ by an application of thought, if this were the case knowledge would cease to be a moving creative force and become nothing more than a static encyclopaedia. For Nietzsche particularly, understanding involves an experience of history as the vital driving force of life and action. 12. It is also the case that ‘vitality’ and ‘vigour’ share the same Latin root. Vigere means ‘to be lively’ which gives rise to velocity or watch.[10] In Old English vigere becomes wacan used to designate ‘to wake up’ or ‘arise’. In Germanic this word becomes ‘to be awake’ and even the vegetable because of its connection with nature and life,[11] suggesting that vigour can designate the birth of life itself. Thus, history is not only a simple chronology but also an opening of life. 13. So for Nietzsche, history requires un-history, as colour requires non-colour. In our jealousy or even fear of death we see only the ruminating unhistorical beast as the happy existant. The beast “gets up in the present without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is.” Therefore for Nietzsche the beast is honest, having no sense of the past or the future it is unable to make judgments, or fear retribution. It exists in an unfiltered light of day open and unprotected and yet free from memory. It is honest because it cannot be subject or the cause of any judgment[12] or retribution, including juridical retribution. It follows that the beast operates in a pure present yet eternal moment of coincidence of its being and objectivity. 14. But for us, historical thinking beasts, because we cannot be honest, forgetting is impossible in life, happiness, even in its suspension of time in the moment of its experience, can only be unhistorical. Unless we join the situationists and allow intoxication to afford us a moment of honest forgetfulness, although ironically even such a ‘beastly’ moment is conditional on history. Before we try to locate Nietzsche’s conception of justice and its source in history, we need to outline some of the key ideas of his essay. Forgetting 15. Forgetting is a necessary condition of action and existence, “just as both light and darkness belong in life of all organic things”, forgetting forms the boundary of the horizon. Or in another sense, forgetting is the crucial limit setting out the boundaries of experience of knowledge and of itself. This is in contrast, simply put, to the idealised notions of knowledge pre-existing in the world waiting the discovery or unveiling. The notion of knowledge as naturally occurring sacred ‘text’ (fact) waiting innocently for interpretation by scientists and experts. 16. According to Nietzsche, the loss of the power to forget leads to inaction, a loss of movement of life required to format the body. In short forgetting is horizon of the movement material history and transcendence. Without forgetting we have a transcendent “coming into being”, a pure disembodied consciousness as a “stream of becoming”. It also follows that a loss of action results in the loss of the material body. We loose the bodily purpose of life, the vitality of being and action. Or in other words, loss of power to forget leaves us nothing but a pure and history-free cyclical motion, akin to rumination, a person without access to the choices, just or unjust acts, movements, but being (not existing) in a sort of negative misplaced eternity. 17. Such a person “sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other” and becomes lost in the “stream of becoming” not even daring to lift a finger. Thus we see that for Nietzsche, unlike Descartes, the coincidence of the thinking and corporeal being is essential for life. Thus he concludes that it is impossible to lead a life without forgetting: “There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and is finally destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.” 18. We can see the importance of forgetting exemplified at the point of a revolutionary victory, or indeed any final violent point, at the moment of complete and deliberate forgetfulness of the past and before the ‘new’ history is constructed, here the power to forget is intensified and at its highest accompanied by corresponding increase in bodily activity and movement (i.e. the revolution) At that unique but single point of victory the past is forgotten. Or, in other words, history falls from our consciousness liberating our sense of unlimited and un-limiting freedom (even if only during the transient period) thus liberating the and we can forget us because in time) having been destroyed, yet at the same moment fear of the ‘new’ forces life out of the just-past[13] revolution (re-)introducing ‘new’ history. Or as Nietzsche says, “that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential” meaning that only though the unhistorical condition will the violence of the change, the force of the revolution bring forth life and history, or put another way forgetting is a necessary transformative force, a necessary condition of change. 19. Forgetting is also a necessary and liberating condition of life, without the power to forget we would not be capable of doing anything. For Nietzsche it is also the crucial feature of what he calls the critical methodology of history, the liberating force of history. Yet, inevitably forgetting is, on another level, a source of injustice. It amounts to the power to break the past in re-affirmation of the dominance of life and drags the past before the “court of justice”. However, according to Nietzsche, such a court is able to deliver only one verdict condemning history. This is because “Here it is not righteousness which sits in judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force”. The judgment of this court is “unmerciful and always unjust.” The authority for such judgment is the sovereignty of forgetting and “life and being unjust are become one and the same”. Thus the power to forget operates to transform history into life, freeing life from history. Yet the appeal to unjust justice ironically appears to follow the logic of the judgment of history, but reversing it in favour of life. Similarly, the violence of history is reversed in favour of life to affirm life rather than to repress life, but yet to force the coincidence of being and the body, or more broadly the harmony of the subject and the object. 20. Hence the power of forgetting becomes the source of freedom for life, liberation from the ‘objective’ inevitability of the judgment of history, and the critical means for the destruction of the unjust constructs of history, such as “a right, a caste, a dynasty”. 21. The notion of forgetting as a delineation of the boundary history for life could equally usefully be employed in examining the sources of the ‘body’ of law. The unique unhistorical point of temporary victory of the body is at the same moment a formative event of source of law and of unjust (in)justice. Forgetting and Lies 22. Nietzsche’s important insight is to show the significance of the power of forgetting as the underpinning condition of freedom capable of transforming mere beastly existence in the pure honest moment into life itself. Life becomes undeniably chronologically placed, but free of, what he would see to be the oppression of the inevitability of history. 23. Similarly, the idea of justice is based not only on its ‘due’ process, but also on a system of allocation of the labels of untruth and truth. Justice does not necessarily require a finding of an absolute truth to become a just outcome; although a coincidence of the truthfulness and result is welcome, it is not necessary. It follows that a conception of justice free but located in life will require an understanding of the theory of lies. Nietzsche’s fear of death expressed as dual denial of history and its un-history such that the worship of the happy moment replaces life is analogous to fear of lies and denial of untruths as a necessary pre-condition of truth. Such a notion is close to the idea of parrhesia as developed by Foucault in his Fearless Speech. The plastic force as the limit of forgetting 24. According to Nietzsche, in an existentialist way, a closed horizon is necessary for life defining the limits of its forgetting. The scope of the horizon depends on what Nietzsche calls the plastic force that is, what could be called, the wholeness of the being of the body in its relation to others and as shaped by its contact (existence) with experience, time and others. He defines the plastic force as “that force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of shaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one’s self” or in short the vital experience of living and resistance to the end of life. 25. In one sense this could be read in purely biological terms as indicating the idea of a super-man, but in fact his use of the “single tender injustice” suggests a wider and deeper meaning of the idea of plastic force relating to the body and what can superficially be called the life force, which includes philosophy, the mind and politics. Indeed Nietzsche talks of the inner nature, the Hegelian subjective strong enough to define an unlimited frontier incorporating all history, which is able to ‘take’ even with violence, from the past without risk of interference from the ‘injurious overseer’ of the historical sense. This amounts to a transformative affirmation of life, expressed in Nietzsche’s visceral language as blood. 26. In short, what we see is a subjective, restless, vibrant yet empirical model of history, placing action at the centre of the movement of time, within a horizon of experience the scope of which is determined by plastic force. As Nietzsche points out the problem now faced here is that this model fails to address issues of what makes experience a mistake or a judgment unjust. He points out that this leads to a relativist argument and it is possible to have a happy but unjust and unknowing man of action, and a just and scholarly person; the former thrives and the latter dies. Because the happiness (and discrimination) lies with the unhistorical beast, the unhistorical is the way out of the relativist dilemma. In other words, the moments of unhistorical form life, or as he puts it “the unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere in which life generates itself alone, only to disappear again with the destruction of this atmosphere.” This does not mean to say that the past is ignored, it is an essential element of human life, but in making of history out of the past the unhistorical offers a sort of shield from the ‘injurious overseer’ to help overcome the fear of life, or the fear of the unknown future. 27. We can see this for example in the explanations offered for the existence of a new nation, located in a justifyingly remote (but not necessarily just) unrecorded but generally glorious past. Interestingly, totalitarian dictatorships also tend use fabricated, although not necessarily untrue, history to historicise an anti-historical moment and thus making the citizen unhistorical in the bovine sense,[14] but with the aim of homogenising experiences and senses into an overriding ideal. 28. This heady elixir of violence, passion and of “deeds in such an excess as to be outside even of love”, speaks of un-logicised thought, the infinite, actions so complete in their uniqueness so as not to require the objectification. Or put another way, the object is dissolved into a new subjective object. The ‘historical’ person glancing into the past is thereby propelled into the future fuelled by the gaseous hopes of justice and happiness. For such a historical person, according to Nietzsche, “the meaning of existence will come increasingly to light in the course of its process”. The process of knowing, resolving historical phenomena transforms the phenomena into objects of knowledge. Nietzsche argues that the recognition of the transformation of history into an object spells the death of historical phenomena. The perception of death of history once recognised confirms “the delusion, the injustice, the blind suffering and generally the entire temporal dark horizon of that phenomenon.” This uncovers the immanent power of history, which in this self-knowledge denies life. On the other hand, the immanence of unhistorical life defeats the given inevitability of history 29. However, history is governed by a higher power, the force of the unhistorical which brings forth a “new stream of life”. If history is allowed to govern life and the present through its demand that it “is to be a science”, seeking glory in the logic of the universal and the absolute, its logos deforms and destroys life. 30. Thus Nietzsche concludes that “In so far as history stands in the service of life, it stands in the service of the unhistorical power and will therefore, in this subordinate position, never be able to (and should never be able to) become pure science, something like mathematics.” 31. The question for Nietzsche is to find a balance between life and history, the extent to which life requires history. If we have too much history “living crumbles away and degenerates”, but history requires life and without it “degenerates through decay”. In short it is the “excess of history that harms the living person.” 32. Or put another way, the sovereignty of history’s dictatorship, or historicism of life extinguishes life if it is “conceived as pure knowledge”, but history is brought into life and given to the living person in a trinity of relationships (corresponding to Nietzsche’s methodology of history) “as an active and striving person” that is monumental history, and as “a person who preserves and admires” the antiquarian history, and finally it belongs to a person as a “suffering person in need of emancipation, expressed as critical history. 33. In short, history is not an objective science but should be used for “the purpose of living” sometime as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian and sometimes, to achieve freedom as emancipatory critical history. Nietzsche summarise our relationship with history as “summonsed by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, and held to the limits by the plastic power within, the understanding of the past is desired at all times to serve the future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a forceful living future.” And one should add, critically free of objective historical proof. Where of Justice? 34. I have tried above to outline some of Nietzsche’s basis ideas on history and action, including the point that it is possible locate both justice and injustice within the field of the horizon and subject to the scope of plastic power. So, can we now ask, where does Nietzsche locate justice? 35. Perhaps surprisingly, having been brought up to revere the domination of logo-scientific thinking, we find that Nietzsche’s justice originates in blind violent passion, the passion which cuts out senses, feelings and judgments, yet objective in its construction (and destruction) and liberated, free of inevitable or inexorable progress of history or law. 36. Justice therefore comes from “It is the most unjust condition of the world, narrow, thankless with respect to the past, blind to what has passed, deaf to warnings, a small living vortex in a dead sea of night and forgetting: nevertheless this condition – unhistorical, thoroughly anti-historical – is the birthing womb not only of an unjust deed but much more of every just deed” Thus, the anti-historical un-justice, becomes the essential creative force, a revolutionary force, without which “no people achieve its freedom” a force of life faced towards “the right of what is to come into being” i.e. life. Justice contains injustice, because it is not absolute and totalising. Nietzsche shows that objectivity and justice have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, justice requires injustice, otherwise we would not have any sense of justice, the revolutionary movements, the moment of progression come about in moments of forgetting (the past or legal precedent), within the scope of our immanent plastic force. 37. We also see reflect in this idea Derrida’s conception of justice as created by political violence and power, the objective force of authority. In case of Nietzsche the source of justice is violence of life, the need to live, the call of boiling blood, coupled not with denial or reformulation of the past, but on the contrary, with a deep understanding of history being and time powered, or liberated, by forgetting, and in the case of justice liberated by lies. 38. According to Nietzsche, for peoples to achieve freedom or (un)just deeds, (note here in passing the submission of the moral value judgment to life and action), the active person must act without conscience and without knowledge. The forgetting frees the person of action to do one thing to become unbound from the past. Such a person “is unjust towards what lies behind him and knows only one right, the right of what is to come into being”. The creative force unleashed in the overwhelming right of coming into being subsumes the person, justifying the done-action it becomes the ‘excess love’ and liberates the force of life from the logo-scientific thinking, the unhistorical is transformed into the judge. 39. But at the same time by virtue of its strength and power, objectivity lays a claim to justice. But not only justice it also claims historical justice – a power to pass judgment over past times. However, if we turn flip this idea round objectivity may not in fact be just, but its presence gives the appearance, chimera, or a mere depiction (Schiller) of justice. 40. Nietzsche described this claim to justice as follows: - The hand of the just man authorised to sit in judgment no longer trembles when it holds the scales. Unsparingly he puts on weight after weight against himself. His eye does not dim if he sees the pan in the scales rise and fall, and his voice rings out neither hard nor broken when he delivers the verdict. 41. The judge becomes the “cold demon of knowledge” spreading “out around him the ice cold atmosphere of a terrifying superhuman majesty.” We feel terror, fear violence from this demon of justice, the direction is given by the command “You must”; logic has removed your humanity and life. The will is to truth, total and unconditional, as “the Last Judgment”. Although, perhaps a somewhat bleak paraphrase of Hegelian view of history. 42. The combination of the “unconditional will to be just” with the ‘thoughtlessly glorified’ truthful man leads in the real world to much suffering and injustice coming “directly from the drive for justice without the power of judgment” can it seems only be mitigated and returned to life within the scope of plastic force. Plastic force is the horizon of the movement of lies and of forgetting, affirming justice in a form outside the logic of the commandments and the Last judgment. Thus avoiding the relativist criticisms and yet fully appropriating for life the unjust in justice. 43. Similarly you can’t have pure ‘servers of truth’ searching for barren truth, that is the objective truth. Accordingly “the highest demands of modern man are for a loftier and purer justice, a virtue which has never had anything pleasant, knows no attractive feelings, but is hard and terrifying.” 44. So, if Nietzsche is right and justice has no connection with objectivity, can we say that magnanimity or forgiveness power judgment? It is interesting to observe that the notion of forgiveness is central to the reconciliation process. Here, a public declaration of claim to truth coupled with apparently a voluntary assumption of responsibility for a past and perhaps (it matters not) an unlawful act is sufficient to exempt the accused from the just consequences of that act. In other words forgiveness and magnanimity, although ‘good’ and noble virtues, operate to reintroduce causality to justice moving it within the scope of the objective/subjective dichotomy, thus historicising justice and removing it from life, reducing justice to nothing but an expression of its own emptiness. Or as Nietzsche better put it: “Weakness must tolerate, unless it wishes to feign strength and turn justice on the judgment seat into a performing actress.” 45. However, what is missing is the area of experience, the vitality of experience from life, the truth does not lie in canonical “measuring past opinions and deeds by universal public opinion of the moment” like a painting does not show complete empirical essence of the thing, it is only a depiction. But in the moment of forgetting crucial for life, the forgetting allows a movement, yet is also a temporary suspension between moments of transformation. Truth like history lies in these moments. Absolute truth kills absolutely and absolute justice amounts to the literal terminality of the Last Judgement. In conclusion, Nietzsche writes[15] that history should not search for universal ideas “but that its worth is directly one which indicates a known, perhaps a habitual theme, a daily melody, in an elegant way, elevates it, intensifies it to an inclusive symbol, and thus allows one to make out in the original theme an entire world of profundity, power and beauty. What is appropriate, however in this process, before everything else, is a great artistic potential, a creative hovering above and a loving immersion in the empirical data, a further poetical composing on the given types – to this process objectivity certainly belongs, but as a positive quality.” In short the aesthetics of justice. Notes [1] Frederick Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life “ Ian Johnston’s 1998 translation at: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/history.htm [2] III “Although the account is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession” in Kahn Charles H. “The Art and Thought of Heraclitus” 1979 Cambridge University Press p 29 [3]Kahn Charles H. “The Art and Thought of Heraclitus” 1979 Cambridge University Press p 12-1 [4] Kahn Charles H. “The Art and Thought of Heraclitus” 1979 Cambridge University Press VII p 31 [5] Op cit. n.1 [6] Although according to Alexandre Kojeve Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 1980 Cornell University Press p 132-3, the aim of Hegel’s philosophy, 'Science' means the whole system, was “to give an account of the fact of History”. The project is made possible only if we agree with Hegel that “the real Concept (that is, Bring revealed to itself by empirically existing Discourse) is Time”. According to Kojeve, Hegel’s philosophy (or Science) deals with this task at three levels: phenomenologically the philosophy “describes the existence of a Man who sees he lives in a World in which he knows he is free and historical individual” metaphysically the philosophy describes what the World in which Man can appear must be and ontologically what must be the Being able “to exist as such in the World”. In other words if the real experienced object is taken to mean the coincidence of the Object and the Subject in Time, not referenced temporally but in the eternity of circular motion we find relation of Being and History. [7] Levinas E, Totality and Infinity 1969 Duquesne University Press p18. [8] Although I have some reservations with regard to many of the then topical items discussed in his paper, I think that overall the essay is capable of providing some useful insights. [9] A dichotomy also identified as troublesome by Hegel but resolved not through rejection but redefinition and synthesis. [10] As in “to keep guard”. [11] The American Heritage Dictionary of English language, Fourth Edition at http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE553.html [12] Here judgment, I think must be used in the moral sense. [13] In the temporal sense, not juridical. [14] We also note the reverence totalitarian systems have for preserving the past, for didactic purposes of allegedly enlightening the population of the errors of the past, never to be repeated. [15] In concluding this part of his essay p 29/30.