(no subject)
Jul. 2nd, 2022 08:59 pmSimilar to the way in which Bergson contrasts time and duration, intellect and intuition, Péguy differentiates between history and tradition, science and experience. To illustrate this difference, for example, in Clio history is compared to a long railway line that runs along the coast and that allows one to stop at any station one wishes. In this metaphor tradition—collective memory—appears as the coast, with its marshes, people, fishes, estuaries of rivers and streams, as life on land and life in the sea.
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The countermodel of history that Péguy proposes against the systematic endeavor of the Sorbonnards is oriented on secondary-school teachers in rural areas, who act upon the basis of their “tacit experience” as (family) people and (world) citizens, that is, as committed witnesses of his- tory who, caught in a precarious social situation, try to attain orientation about and within history.
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According to Deleuze, Péguy does not conceive of historical tradition from the perspective of the endpoint of a series of events; he proceeds on the basis of the unique event, which is the reason for the process of passing something on in the first place: it sets the process in motion and continues it.
--- Heoning Schmidgen. Bruno Latour in Pieces, 2014.
In contrast with schoolbook history that treats its subject as tourism, he thinks about it as travel, similar to the original approach introduced by Herodotus more than two thousand years ago.
Also see Lawvere, Categories of Space and Quantity, 1992, wrt the example of a sojourn, as a variable intensive quantity. Peguy's history vs a schoolbook one would have a completely different intensive quantity pattern, while the terminal object in the underlying extensive category, i.e. the total would be the same.