“History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. It is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility.”

— Colin Wilson

Source: Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964), p. 13-14

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. It is the enemy of subjectivity, which is…" by Colin Wilson?

Colin Wilson 192

author 1931–2013

Related quotes

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses (1922), Ch. 2: Nestor

“Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 149.

“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech at New York Press Club (9 September 1912), in The papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25:124
1910s

“For in the last analysis it is human consciousness which is the subject matter of history.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

The Historian's Craft, pg.151

“I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.”

Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography

Source: My Autobiography (p. 271 Simon and Schuster 1964 edition)

“In our society, we don not study history to understand the process of change but just to entertain ourselves with past events. For this reason, history is not regarded as a useful subject. The history that we teach in our educational institutions is political history and, as such, it is used by the ruling classes.”

Mubarak Ali (1941) Historian, activist, scholar

In the Shadow of History, Chapter: Why should we study History? p. 4
History, What History Tells Us, In the Shadow of History

“History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”

Karl Marx book The Holy Family

The Holy Family, Ch. VI (1845).

“History has never seen Emmitt Smith. I don't care what has come before me. That's why they call it history you create new history.”

Emmitt Smith (1969) American football player and sports broadcaster

Rick Gosselin (August 10, 2003) "Making another rush at history - Smith shooting for 1,000-yard season", Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, p. C8.

“History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.”

Jill Lepore (1966) American historian

“Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i. e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Karl Barth Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl, 1952, 1959 p. 284-285
Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl 1952, 1956

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Colin Wilson 192

Related quotes

Related topics