What the Past is For

What the Past is For

Leszek Kolakowski — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek Kolakowski.

I'd like to say a few words and something which has the title what the past is for what the past is for so I start with a few words about the future and this is a called future suitor ology according to my definition physiology is an extremely serious science whose subject not only non existent but necessarily non-existent is to say it the future does not exist and never will with common sense remark and battery heavy science never out is non existent subject well perhaps we would not find this worry if he did not immediately bring to our attention and analogous but much more terrifying insight namely that the past doesn't exist eyes from the thymus Center Gerstein and his classic flexions on the subject the mystery of time has observed and tormented nearly all major philosophers up to burton who sell and third the past by definition is an ocean of events that once happened and this induce event are either retained in our memory or the so that they exist only as part of our psychological reality or they reconstructed by us on the basis of our present experience and it is only the present experience our present reconstruction of the past that is real not the past as such in other words the entire realm of the past exists only it seems as a portion of our mortality of my own consciousness the past in itself is nothing this argument can strike us as a kind of sophistry or bizarre and philosophical exercise but it's not so it is not so firstly it is serious however we can also look at the question from another angle everything we see attached is obviously a product of events that had happened worse perhaps than seconds ago perhaps ten million years ago it is not is it not therefore proper and reasonable to say that whoever we see or that is the past in metaphysical terms the fastest perhaps nothing but in terms of our direct experience the past is everything our entire knowledge of the so-called external world is nothing but continuous an interrupted stream of act whereby what was the past becomes present yes we may say that far from being nothing the past is everything the enigma of time is not just something philosophers have constructed to amuse themselves with they try to…