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ObjectionA borrowed life
To devote oneself to inheritance and transmission is to risk living the life of others rather than one's own.
Objects to
- To orient oneself toward the past and transmission is to make one's life a link in a chain: receiving an inheritance, honoring what one owes, passing it on in turn.
- But this link, by dint of serving the chain, ends up no longer belonging to itself. One lives under the gaze of the dead and in care for those not yet born, between a loyalty to the past and a duty to the future, without ever inhabiting the present, which truly is one's own.
- Under the fine name of depth a weight may hide: debts one did not choose, roles one perpetuates without willing them. To define oneself by what one has received is sometimes to spare oneself the task of becoming oneself: lacking , one lives out of loyalty a life that is not one's own.
Therefore So the orientation toward memory can dispossess us of the only time that is ours: by honoring too much what comes before and after, one forgets to live the in-between, which is our life.
Deepenings
The weight of the dead on the living
- « Tradition is the democracy of the dead », in Chesterton's phrase: giving a voice to those who came before us. But one can turn the formula around: why should the dead get a vote on our lives?
- Each generation inherits a world it did not make; the question is not whether to disown it, but whether receiving it obliges one to perpetuate it, or leaves one free to take it up otherwise.
Possible resolutions of the objection
Challenges