Accepting the Past, Facing the Future

How do we relate to our past, and what might this tell us about how to relate to our future? One of the most provocative approaches to this question comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose doctrine of the eternal return asks this: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’”? To ask myself the question of the eternal return is to wonder about the worth of what I have done, to inquire whether it would stand the test of being done innumerable times again.

There is, however, a more disturbing worry underneath this one. For me to be able to ask the question of the eternal return already supposes that I have come into existence; and the question may arise of whether I should affirm the conditions that brought me into existence, not innumerable times but even once. To see the bite of this worry, let me share a bit of my own past. Had Hitler not come to power in Germany, the Holocaust and World War II would not have happened. Had World War II not have happened, my father would not have signed up for officer’s training school. Had he not signed up, he would not have gone to college, majored in economics, and then moved to New York for a job. And so he would not have met my mother. In short, without the Holocaust I would not be here.

We need not look very deeply to see how many people’s existence requires the occurrence of the Holocaust. And as Peter Atterton has argued recently here, all of us can trace our existence back to some mass atrocity or another (if not the Holocaust, then perhaps to slavery or to the Crusades).

How, then, might we relate to the past, and specifically to the fact that we owe our existence to one or another historical atrocity (or, for that matter, to a host of other events:  weather patterns, feelings of lust, etc.)? One suggestion, a pessimistic one, is offered by another philosopher, R. Jay Wallace, in his book “The View From Here.” Wallace argues that to affirm my existence, to say yes to it, requires that I affirm (among other unpalatable things) the past that led to it. To be sure, he does not claim that we must feel good about it. We might wish that our existence had come about another way. However, he argues that we cannot have what he calls “all-in regret” about it. It’s unfortunate that our existence had to arise this way, but since that’s the way it happened, affirming our existence requires affirming the past that led to it. It is no wonder that he calls his position one of “modest nihilism.”

But must we affirm the past that led to our existence? Must we be modest nihilists? For one thing, it is open to us to say that it would have been better for us not to have been born and for the Holocaust not to have happened. From a more cosmic perspective (assuming that recent history would not have offered us a comparable horror), we might say that it would have been better had the Holocaust not occurred and that the planet be filled with people different from us. When Atterton concludes his column by saying that we have no right to exist, I take it this is precisely what he is claiming. And, as far as it goes, I agree with him.

But that is not where the question should make us most uncomfortable, and not where Wallace stakes his ground. To affirm our existence is not a matter of what we think would be cosmically or impersonally better. It is to say what we prefer, what we would choose. Would I prefer that the Holocaust or slavery or the Crusades not have happened and that I not exist? If I were somehow allowed to rewind the tape of history and then let it go forward again in a way that prevented one of these atrocities, and thus my existence, would I do it? That is a more troubling question for those of us who are attached to our lives.

I would like to think that, at least in my better moments, I would, however reluctantly, acquiesce to that deal. At those times where I have a more vivid encounter with the Holocaust, for instance, when at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington I saw the shoes of many who had perished in the camps, I think I would, with difficulty, be willing to trade my existence for those of its victims. (It is another and even more vexing question of whether I would trade my childrens’ lives to spare theirs, recognizing that my childrens’ existence requires my own. But for reasons outside the scope of this essay, I believe that that is a question for my offspring to answer rather than me.) I don’t know for sure what I would do, but I hope I would be able to rise to the occasion.

If this is right, then perhaps the proper attitude to take toward the monstrosities that gave rise to us might be called one of acceptance rather than affirmation. We are the products of histories we cannot change, histories that contain atrocities we cannot undo. We know that it would have been better if those horrors had not happened and, consequently, we had not been born, and in nobler moments we might even prefer that it had been that way. Our lives are rooted in tragedies that have no reparation, and in that they are inescapably tainted. We must accept this, but we need not affirm it. The difference lies in what we would have been willing to do, given the opportunity.

At this point, however, someone might ask why it matters what I, or any one of us, would do in an imaginary scenario that cannot possibly happen. The Holocaust happened; it cannot be prevented retroactively. So why should we take up any attitude toward our existence in relation to it? There are two reasons for doing so, one more philosophically reflective and the other more practical. The philosophically reflective reason is this: We condemn the Holocaust. I believe most of us would say that it should not have occurred. But had it not occurred, many of us would not be here. So what is our attitude toward the Holocaust, really? Do we really condemn it, or do we not? Asking the questions I am posing here will reveal to us aspects of who we are in ways that we may or may not find comfortable.

The second reason is practical. If we would be willing to sacrifice our existence for the sake of preventing past horrors, what would we be willing to sacrifice of ourselves to prevent horrors now and in the future? And why are so many of us (and I include myself here) not doing so? I should note here that the situation of the past is not exactly symmetrical to that of the future. There is a complication. If I had not existed, I would not technically have lost anything, because there would have been no “I” to lose it in the first place. (Of course, it’s even more complicated than that. I have to exist to consider the possibility of my never having existed.) However, now that I do exist, in sacrificing myself I do stand to lose something — my future existence.

Nevertheless, with that caveat in mind, a willingness to sacrifice our existence in the past should be matched by a willingness to sacrifice at least something of value now or in the future to prevent or mitigate new atrocities. What would we be willing to sacrifice for the refugees from Syria or the potential victims of police violence, or the impoverished undocumented workers in our country — those whose troubles will help determine who our children and grandchildren are? What would we be willing to sacrifice to prevent the enormous consequences of climate change, which seem already to be multiplying their victims? And if we’re not prepared to make some sacrifice, what does this in turn say about our relation to the horrors that gave rise to us? Our relation to the past and our relation to the future are not entirely distinct from each other. In asking about one, we offer answers — and perhaps not answers we would prefer to acknowledge — to the other.

As a new year is upon us, then, we might do better to renew rather than to forget our old acquaintance with the past, and allow that to be a guide to our future.

Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, and the author of, most recently, “A Significant Life.”