§51 Four-Thousand Years of Indebtedness

In ANow Profile no. 5., the Danish writer, Peter Hovmand (44.29mins), was reminded that in the past he had echoed Karen Blixen’s sentiments that his thinking was at least four thousand years old. He meant, of course, that his thinking is not unique — that one’s thinking, and thinking as such, is only ever the inheritance of a long tradition going back attic Greece:

“We owe a lot to the old Greeks, and Nietzsche owes a lot to them, and we should be aware of that” (45.05)

In 1841, the ‘sage of Concord’, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) penned something similar, which is worth dwelling on to comprehend the full implications of this sensibility:

‘There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has left, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.’ (Emerson 1965, 139)

Based on this short extract, it is worth drawing out the fact that Hovmand also reflected on the role that empirical science and scientism has had on the declining fate of the public intellectual. Indeed, following Emerson’s line of thought here, the intellectual should never claim individualism or personal celebrity. His genius, like that of a more artistic sensibility, is always indebted to those that came before and his responsibility is only ever to the past and the past to come.

/Pete Watt

References:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1965. “History.” In The Portable Emerson: Essays. Poems. Journals. Letters, edited by Mark van Doren, 139–64. London: Viking Press.

Originally published at anowmedia.com on August 10, 2018.