 
                        20080531.01

                  History as Orientation

     My account of orientation lends a new and useful
perspective on what we call history. It is easy enough to
discourse about the preterite nature of all mental imagery:
that everything we remember is of the past, and is
therefore in some manner deficient in reality. This line of
reasoning may easily become misleading. Although our mental
imagery is of the past, our anticipation and intention
unavoidably projects what is past into the future; and this
process of projection, as I have said, is the essence of
our existence: the present.

     History is significant in that it is calculated and
purposeful orientation. We study history to try to
understand where we have come from and where we are
heading. It requires no emphasis that the orientation
provided by formal and informal histories is far from
perfect, that it is often misleading and deceptive, that it
seems not infrequently to shatter and to disintegrate into
nothing. Still, it is the best we have, and the
circumstance that we are (still) here, indicates that
history is meaningful, that it works.

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Copyright 2008, Ernst Jochen Meyer
