In Bertrand Russell's essay 'On Being Modern Minded' (In Unpopular Essays, 1950) he deliberates on the modern man's desire to be contemporary and remove himself as far as possible from 'the quaint clothes and cumbersome phrases of former times' which he expresses that he, who imagines himself to be at the apex of intelligence sees as not worthy of much attention or investment in thought. For instance if Hamlet is to be interesting to a really modern reader, it must first be translated to the language of Marx or Freud, or better still, into a jargon inconsistently compounded of both. He goes on to stress that the contempt for the past, although having had precedence, is no more pronounced in former times as is today. Even from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century Roman antiquity was admired; the Romantic movement revived the Middle Ages, Shakespeare and Milton were read in their original forms; but since the 1914-18 war it has almost become fashionable to ignore the past en bloc. In addition, the modern man is presumed to be very modest about his personal powers and seeks the admiration of the herd, subordinating his judgment or expression of eccentric ideas to the general opinion. Ultimately, Russell maintains that a certain degree of isolation both in space and time is essential to generate the independence required for the most important work of the artist, philosopher, astronomer, scientist; there must be something which is felt to be of more importance than the admiration of the contemporary crowd.
Agreed. But despite Russell's criticism of the movement towards subjectivity and his strong adherence to logic in every form of analysis, his emphasis was on the need to curb dogmatism whether of the Right or of the Left, to the extent he spoke of the changes in the nature of man as - 'Men lived in one kind of illusion, and when they lost it they fell into another'. I am not going to build on or counter any of these ideas, but what seemed interesting was his alluding to this 'ahistoric nature of human beings' worthy of exploration after reading his essay. Of course, one could ask what exactly does he mean by that? Is it something as simple as saying 'I prefer to read a postmodern novel likeSlaughterhouse Five on a regular day than going through the tomes of the Illiad', or even that 'I could live without reading the Iliad even though I consider myself a literary person?' (Thanks to movies likeTroy, the gap has been sufficiently bridged). Or that , 'I normally find myself more interested in learning about the intricacies of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 than in the various logistic and tributary revolts of Peloponnesia back in good old 400 BC'. Of course on the other hand, there are days when an account on The History channel, say of the Neanderthal man's tool sharpening traits in the middle Paleolithic era is most intriguing. But I need to confess during this I tend to put on a hat, like a trying and wanting to understand the prehistoric Stone Age Hat in order to be proactive about it.
In the broader context, I am reminded in particular of a discourse by a fictional character (specifically the writer in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello) who, in addressing an audience on the night of her prize winning book award, says 'Despite this splendid award, for which I am deeply grateful, despite the promise it makes that, gathered into the illustrious company of those who have won it before me, I am beyond time's envious grasp, we all know, if we are being realistic, that it is only a matter of time before the books which you honor, and with whose genesis I have had something to do, will cease to be read and eventually cease to be remembered. And properly so. There must be some limit to the burden of remembering we impose on our children and grandchildren. They will have a world of their own, of which we should be less and less part.' The character decidedly agrees to the mortal nature of human beings as the premise allowing to redeem them in a sense from history or the canonical forms of memory. The loss of this memory which they would otherwise be expected to preserve is in fact quite counter-intuitive to the notion of an identity based on past experiences or a history, and the underlying imperative need for it to be sustained.
Richard Rorty, even closer to our times, in his essay 'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy' asserts that the Enlightenment idea of reason embodies the theory that there is a relation between the ahistorical nature of the human soul and the truth that free and open discussion will produce 'one right answer' to moral as well as scientific inquiries. He says however that contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human, and that anthropologists and historians of science have blurred the distinction between innate rationality and products of acculturation. On one hand philosophers such as Heidegger and Gadamer have given us ways of seeing human beings as historical all the way through, and at another, others such as Quine and Davidson have blurred the distinction between permanent truths of reason and temporary truths of fact. He says the result is to erase the picture of the self common to Greek metaphysics, Christian theology and Enlightenment rationalism: the picture of an ahistorical nature centre, the locus of human dignity surrounded by an adventitious and inessential periphery. Therefore the Kantian identification with a central transcultural and ahistorical self is replaced by a quasi- Hegelian identification with our own community, thought of as a historical product. I felt that went sufficiently to some length to explain the feelings behind identity, conformance to a clan or race as a mode of cultural adaptation rather than as a direct antithesis to the completely rational, memoryless concept of an individual.
In another somewhat diametric view however (but nonetheless enriching), in Rorty's 'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality' essay, he points out that one of the intellectual advances made in our century is the steady decline in interest in the quarrel between Plato and Nietzsche about what we are really like. And about the growing willingness to neglect the question "What is our nature?" to substitute the question "What can we make of ourselves?" He says that we have come to see the main lesson of both history and anthropology is our extraordinary malleability as the flexible, protean, self-shaping animal rather than as the rational animal. Hence the ability and the questions relating to "What is man?" have in the past two hundred years come to seem much less important. The explanation for this, he observes lies in that the reason of our own increased willingness to substitute hope for knowledge is that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary increase in wealth, literacy and leisure, particularly in North America and Europe. This increase made possible an unprecedented acceleration in the rate of moral progress. Such events as The French Revolution and the end of transatlantic slave trade helped rich democracies to say: It is enough for us to know that we live in an age in which human beings can make things better for ourselves. We do not need to dig behind this historical fact to non-historical facts about what we really are. This set aside Kant's question "What is man" to substitute "What sort of world can we prepare for our great-grandchildren", he says.
To extend this notion to be applicable in the most modern of forms that even the most contemporary set of thinkers tend to at least allude to if not conform to , one needs to consider the existentialist , whose influence in modern day literature (of the sort propounded by Dostoevsky and Kafka) and modern cinema resides to this day (in its own sui generis interpretations).Most supporters saw human beings as self-created ; they are not initially endowed with characteristics but chose their own characteristics 'by leaps'. Thus a person may be said to believe in Heaven and Hell because he or she has chosen to do so. Other existentialists see that the only certainty for each one of us is death, and that the individual must live in the knowledge of that certainty. In geography, it sees individuals as striving to build up a self that is not given, either by nature or culture. With regards to history it is stated that your past is what you are only in that it co-constitutes you. However, to say that you are only your past would be to ignore a large part of reality (the present and the future) while saying that your past is what you were, would entirely detach it from you, which would rather be a kind of bad faith.