Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 019538993X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although the idea of hindsight is frequently associated with the biases, distortions, and outright lies of memory--as in the infamous "20-20" scenario or the conviction that one "knew it all along"--Mark Freeman maintains that this process of looking backward over the terrain of the past can also serve as a profound source of insight, understanding, and self-knowledge. Consider Tolstoy's harrowing tale of Ivan Ilych, revisiting his past on the eve of his death, only to realize that the life he had been living was a lie. Consider as well the many times in our own lives when, upon reviewing the past, we are able to see what we could not, or would not, see earlier on.
Hindsight is also intimately connected to what Freeman calls narrative reflection: Through the distance conferred by time, we can look back on past experiences and see them anew, as episodes in an evolving story. As important as "being in the now" and "living in the moment" are, it is no less important to pause at times and, by looking backward, seek to discern those aspects of experience that might otherwise escape our notice. Far from necessarily leading to deception and lies, therefore, hindsight can lead to wisdom and indeed truth--of a sort, Freeman contends, that is only available in retrospect.
In addition to serving as a central site of self-knowledge, hindsight plays an integral role in the process of moral growth. For, through hindsight, there emerges the opportunity not only to see the possible errors of our ways but to transcend them and thereby to move on to better ways of being in the world. Drawing on psychology, philosophy, literature, and personal experience, this wide-ranging volume offers an insightful and engaging exploration of the role of hindsight both in discerning the personal past and in deepening moral life.
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very dependence on God. While it unquestionably represents “a historicizing of human realities which the classical mentality Hindsight, Narrative, and Moral Life . . . could not have achieved, it is still only a step toward that historicist view of the self-concept on which the notion of individuality depends” (p. 47). Only a step: Augustine’s mode of self-reflection and self-understanding, operating via a newfound and indeed revolutionary reliance on hindsight, is not yet “there”—i.e., here.
this very notion of presence, tied to the immediacy of experience, had to be interrogated. He cites a passage from his book The Reawakening (1995) that describes a quite different kind of response to liberation than any of those introduced thus far. “There had been four Russian men, armed but not against us: four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats.” But, They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a
the outrage would be with us forever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it occurred and in the stories that we should tell of it. (p. 16) Hindsight, here, far from being a source of consolation, becomes instead a source of guilt and, especially, shame. First, there was the shame of animality, as it might be called: Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished. Not by our will, cowardice, or fault, yet
the outrage would be with us forever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it occurred and in the stories that we should tell of it. (p. 16) Hindsight, here, far from being a source of consolation, becomes instead a source of guilt and, especially, shame. First, there was the shame of animality, as it might be called: Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished. Not by our will, cowardice, or fault, yet
book Self-Consciousness, notes that, “Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before” (1989, p. xii). Annie Dillard, reflecting on her own work, provides us with something of a warning in this context: “Don’t hope in a memoir to preserve your memories because it is a certain way to lose them. . . . After you’ve written, you can no longer remember anything but the writing. However true you make the