On the way to this lecture I found out that I had a slight misunderstanding with the gentleman who asked me to lecture. I thought he had asked me to lect on what it meant to be an heir. but when he announced the lecture--of course it was a grief to me as a historian that he couldn't he get his date straight--but when i saw what he had announced--the value of historical understanding--I'm not gong to rewrite the lecture because We all are beings who are inserted into an existing human world at a v. specific conjunction of a very specific moment of time and a most def. piece of space. From the v. beg. our existence is marked the fact of being bound into time and into space. We begin our life by being placed in a definite constellation of human affairs that existed when it accepted us as another human being. That this constellation, the way in which the stars stood at a moment, for us when it bore us, when we were inserted in it, this marks our existence for the rest of our existence. Now note well, it makes our existence, we are not thereby beoming the captives of our stars. I would not advise you to go and spend a lot of money on having your horoscope cut and having your palms read. But how we deal and live with the awareness of such a beginning is a very important part of the story I want to tell. I assume that there are a quite a number of human beings who do not think much at all about the nature of such a being. One can live without the awareness of it, but I think if we look very honestly at ourselves, we are wiser to acknowledge that life starts this way. Now , no one asked us whether we wanted to be placed into the world at that moment and at that very place. it is simply done by the willfulness and the human inadvertence of others. Life is given to us at the outset. we have no choice whatever about this life (develops?) or we find that we have more choices thatn we may wish to have to decide. If we consider life the highest burden the one thing we do not want to be without, then it seems indeed most remarkable, that it is the begining being given to us without our right to be consulted about it. At the outset, we have no choice of the moment, or the specific seting in twhihc to start it. Life comes to us in such a manner, turns out to be the most valuable gift...gain nothing by rebelling against it. We are inserted into a very particular world... how we chose to deal with it either by virture, by convention, or by a certain, uh, law a human world without such a specific character would not be a human world they are Utopian and Utopus means nowhere we have to live with the constant passing of time. A timeless human world is no longer a human world. a present of past time, a present of present time, and a present of future time. Let me interrupt the main flow of my argument for a moment. ...consequence of a time bound existence. we are historical beings Others may tell us we know ourselves by ... So that we can at least try to understand ourselves in our historical dimension. Let us assume for a while that man is more of a biographic datum than a biological datum. Let us see what happens when we believe... arrogant but useful exaggeration. I return to my main theme. ...it is in constant development ... you and the world are developing together. acculturated so that you can function in that world chooses what to deem most significant we are creatures of attention ... you steadily gain the freedom to interact with your world as you see fit, either consciously or unconsciously. ...something left open. something entrusted to you you cannot alter the fact that life has made you an heir, but you can live with different attitudes towards that heritage. ...irrigation channels to the past, and thus let the desert take over in the realm of the mind too much respect for the past forecloses the open future. ...take the two talents entrusted to them, and bury them for safekeeping. ... so that I may concentrate on the so fascinating human nature (as Hubert said?). And let me assume that your find yourself at a most significant moment. It is the moment which compares to the one in your education when you no longer study and learn because someone imposes learning and study on you. it is the moment when by your own free will and choice you study because that has meaning and value for itself. it is the key moment when you make something truly your own. The same term occurs in your relation to and your attitude towards your inheritance. you get the sense that you are not the captive of anything I reach out and slap him. Your reaction will be automatic. Why really?... were you born with it? ... inviolable dignity of the individual is not to be violated thus. "thank you but I will not accept all of it in the way in which you have left it for me. I'm beginning to see some issues in this inheritance that pose problems and I see some matters that I do not consider valid any longer for what my world is becoming " above all you have the obligation to live at the level of your time you learn more and more that heritage serves life, and that life is not simply serving the heritage, although in a very deep sense it is. civilization is, so to say, the reportory of the answers which former people have given, forcefully, or at at times tentatively, to the problems which life posed to them. In one level, you personally can only be understood as historical beings. In order to understand you, I will have hear your story. as i already said, you are a biographic rather than a biological datum. In analogical fashion, civilization is only intelligible in its historical dimension. As a complex organism, its earlier developments lie in the past while its present members take it, with changes, into the future. the historian has always had to make the effort to understand the other. "history is really the reconstruction by the moonlight of memory" a truly disciplined imagination can truly enrich the historian's understanding better than all the statistics. On the other hand, history is one of the most inadequate modes of knowledge. So why pursue it? Some think that the dead have a right to be heard ... the only way to understand ourselves in our historical dimension. ... I am trying to invite you to invest some effort and time to acquaint yourself with your heritage. ... I assume it will be a good course... Now as I have said, historical knowledge is inadequate, but still in its weakness it is an absolutely indispensable part of our growth as human beings. What value does it have? What is the potential profit in studying one's heritage, studying our civilization? let me suggest something about two values to be gained which in one sense may seem to be contradictory with one another. By virtue of what i have said of course, one great values lies in the growth of self understanding. To live here in the present in a world you ultimately only know better if you can see how it came to be. Looking backwards, you may gradually and even if only very incompletely obtain a growing sense of the way you are a part of the human ? made by so many others. ... It could be a matter of simply discovering ... your own sense of citizenship have roots in the Greek polis, or how your search for truth gained by Socrates teaching how to do this, or how your way of speaking effectively to others was already form by Cicero, or how the longing for a larger, more interrelated community was or was not served by Roman Emperors, or how your moral sensibilities derive from the sermon of Jesus, or how the virtue of disciplined labor was already a demand of Benedict's Benedictines. And so on, and so on, and so on. You may gain an awareness of how different your would would be but for the deeds of those before you. Your world would be different if the persians had won teh Battle of Salamis. It would be different if Saint Paul had insisted that one cannot be a Christian without first obeying the full corpus of Jewish law. It would be very different if Western people had not gradually and by bitter experience somehow learned how to overcome their narrower prejudices and learn instead to live by tolerating one another. ... You come to see yourself related to an amazing connected interplay of so many human acts and turns in Western life. Yes, you can live without making the slightest effort at such self-assessment ... just as you can open your car door, turn the keys, step on the gas, and go without ever thinking about the vast interrelated body of thinking about nature, its laws, the developments of complicated tools and hard-won knowledge of techniques in human organization that resulted in bringing forth your ?. I'm pleading for the recognition that growing wisdom about the self comes with ? of our historical dimension. And yet, while you can learn from the past how intrinsically and intricately it is woven into your present condition, the process of knowing the past also asks that you step out of your present and try the so difficult ? of entering lives that are not present. There is no way of coming to understand what Augustine really wanted to mean or what he means for your present existence except by first entering his world, his life, his personality, and hence you need to leave so much of yourself behind and acquaint yourself with a very different being. a part that is populated by others who want to be understood on their own terms, just as you wish to be understood on your own terms. If you try this you will discover that the only way of gaining insight into the richness of human life comes with this discovery that present reality around you offers you no human beings like a Socrates, a Cicero, or an Augustine, or a Saint Francis. Their expression of being human existed only once. they are dead, gone, irrecoverable to a degree. Only the backward travel through time brings to you human beings you could otherwise never know. Those one time forms of being human do indeed have a relation to you. For having been precursors in the making of the tradition to which you still belong. But they also give you an immensely enriching expansion of the sense of how manifold the human potential really is. ... yet, you are related to them ... and as a Westerner you are just another way of being human. So there are at least these two manners which make the history of your own inheritance a valuable matter. You gain a deeper understanding of you present condition, and your travel through time expands your sense of how richly varied human beings have been and are. You profit immensely by standing away from yourself for a while. There are so many things... humanitas And for Romans like Cicero, the word humanitas also meant everything that makes humankind worthy of being human. Seneca said it in two simple words. Colamos Humanitatem. Let us cultivate what makes human beings worthy of being human beings. I'm simply trying to say here that this can only be done by accepting the task of being good heirs: understanding that using and enriching what has been given to you. Student: ... that is because we are temporary ... we don't really want our lives determined by something that is not ourselves ... W: É So certainly, I'm trying to put emphasis on the proposition that, in a way, you would obtain a wrong relation to your heritage if you see yourself as a captive ... How you gonna get rid of everything that has been built in to you, I do not know. Can you do it in a thought experiment? Student: Éan example. It's not so much getting rid of it, it's a function of how you look at it. W: That's what I maintain. S: Éyou're reading the history of the greeksÉa novel, a character in it. Of course there are things that are historically determined, but there's this--the nature of the person, particularly stronger natures, stand out above history, they're kind of transhistorical. That's true, the great mass of people can't help but being almost completely determined by custom. But it seems to me that in particular the most interesting people who have lived have a kind of--I would say a transhistorical property. One can feel them a certain transitivity. ÉlibertyÉ W: I'm not sure I understand you, but are you in a way saying: "look, I belong to the kind of beings who don't believe there are eternal values which stand beyond history and those are the ones thatÉare being formed"? That's just going to a difference of opinion on that. As a historian, I have great difficulty believing in eternal values. You have the right to make the values you believe in eternal for yourself, eternal in your own mind. But whether any thing like that exists outside of history, I have difficulties with that. But I would, as a historicist, I stand away from other people on that. S: Mathematics, one could say, of course is discovered and [develops?] over time, but the Greeks know about the relationship between the sides of a triangle, for instance, have a kind of transhistorical character to them. And certain kinds of people pop up, because of their social situations. W: Where you have to be careful, I think, is because there is something that is still related to what somebody once thought or did, wrote about, etc, that you assume it's eternal--well, that may be wrong. It may be just due to the fact that you're still part of a tradition. When you come to the point when you can in no way appreciate any longer what the beauty of the Greek gods was, then we're no longer in the same civilization. Is that what you're aiming for? S: ÉChristianity ... eternal truths, like God. Eternal is a strong word, butÉ W: Are you really seriously trying to persuade me that there is no historical dimension to being a Christian? ... the act of the crucifixion É S: ÉGod had plan for manÉ W: I don't have all that much difficulty to handle the problem that the way in which we, in the western tradition have though about this, is as a historical phenomenon, or historically understandable. But we can develop that. S2: Where did the Western tradition/heritage really begin? Is that a sensible question to ask? W: ... Toynbee ... he would say Western tradition only starts when we come to Gregory VII in the 11th century. ... S3 (sam?) : ... lines between civilizations are dissolving ... our connection with them is instantaneous ... can't study Western Civ in a vacuum. W: All you have to do, in a way, is not to make a fool of yourself by trying to predict how it is going to come out, and where you want to draw the end line. É this University has been leading ... to study other cultures ... Western civilization itself is an extraordinary amalgam How what comes out of Jerusalem and how what comes out of Athens ever really learned to live with one another, and then you have to build into it German war berserks, and the contact with Islam, and slavs, it's an extraordinary mixture already. But, I'm pretty sure whatever direction the world is going to take from here on in, there is a lot of it which has to be understood in terms of what Western Civilization as such contributed to it and made of it. S4: What exactly should Western Civilization do? W: Well, I hope you take seriously the remarks that I made that there is a great gain in Western civilization in the fact that human beings who hated each other, thought they should kill each other for different opinions, different religions, and so on, they have come around at least to the position of learning how to tolerate each other and live with each other. ... this is what I mean by living at the level of your time. You have a commitment to a kind of medicine, a kind of technology, a kind of training of the mind, which you have to stand up for. S5: ... decline of interest in understanding civilization. What would you attribute that decline to? W: There's something that [goes?} on it, the discipline itself. The premium lies in being a specialist. The premium doesn't lie on trying to understand a long, complicated, vast tradition, and keep working on it, and keep working on it. So there is something that has gone on in the discipline itself. É I've lived for at least twenty, thirty years with the clearly growing sense that W. Civ. and our values are not going to be maintained by the young historians. You have fundamental changes within the tradition itself. You also are, I think--some of the discussion has certainly been affected by the fact that so many people have become extremely critical of W CivÉ