Tal,Oct 13 2005, 06:26 PM Wrote:Better question. Why do you need resolve past social injustices in order to examine history? It almost certainly implies that you are putting together history in a cause and effect approach. I would argue that history is a chaotic maelstrom. Making sense of it all is much like taking apart a quilt - one thread at a time. To get a better sense of the whole you must also examine the minute.
[right][snapback]92013[/snapback][/right]
Building on the same thought Tal, there is another simpler precusory question:
After an event, can we ever give a full account of all the factors? Certainly when I was hungry and I ate food, the account is simply that I was hungry. Add the fact that I ate a donut that was located in my kitchen cabinet. Now the account get's a lot longer. Now this is a silly exercise, but it illuminates a simple fact: in order to understand anything you indeed must examine not the whole but the minute, but an account of the minute itself is fuzzier the harder it is examined [Can I ever really account for why I chose the chocolate donut and not the french cruller?].
All in all, you can trust the general account: I was hungry. This is more than satisfactory for any of my means, and surely as deep as I'll ever have to look.
The action itself is - to borrow your term - a "chaotic maelstrom" in a sense, and an account is a category we are attempting to classify it as after the fact. And as discussed earlier, it gets sticky once you get to the small issues. But if you are to answer Drem's first question, you must make that endevour to examine the minute issues. I think that's one endevour I'll sit out ;) .
Cheers,
Munk