“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana, The Life of Reason)
In his Ethics Aristotle suggests that the key distinction between slaves and those who master them lies in their foresight, the key faculty in making provision for the future: “for he that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and he that can do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave.”
As with most efforts at definition, this one is requires a distinction that does not exactly conform to experience. In human experience those recognized as the masters have often achieved this status as the result of victory in war. But insofar as war involves individual combat, is victory the fruit of mental or bodily foresight? Who is more likely to end up dead — one who must take time to think about the response to a potentially fatal blow, or the one whose body moves in reaction against it the way a pianist’s well-practiced hands move to execute the next movement of a musical phrase? The best warrior, like the best pianist, is the one whose body remembers the right moves to make without having to think about it.
But aren’t there certain things the healthy body remembers, as it were, naturally and without practice? The heart remembers to beat, the pancreas remember to secrete insulin, and so forth. As we have come to a better understanding of the body in recent times, it appears to be a complex information processing machine. But what does it mean to process information if not to execute a stream of movements (the presence or absence of change in one’s state or condition) according to a pre-established pattern, in other words to remember it.
Information is, by its very nature, the product of intelligence. Therefore, what our bodies do by nature assumes a form of mental activity. Moreover, to process information accurately means precisely to bring different streams of information together in exactly the right order and relationship, much the way the hands conjointly operate as the pianist plays a piece, or the elements of an orchestra move as planned in the performance of a symphony.
The famous Nike slogan, “just do it” reminds us of the fact that the greatest athletes appear to be those capable of executing just the right movement, in just the right way at just the right time to achieve the result that allows them to score a point or win a victory. Though it may have required practice and the application of another kind of intelligent thought, when they are truly “in the zone” that manifests their best performance, the right choice of action must be selected and executed without premeditation, without conscious deliberation. They just do it.
Whether we realize it or not, this brings us to Santayana’s famous observation, which, like Aristotle’s, turns out to be partially true. We realize this when we remember (as we just did) that, when it comes to the activities of the body, practice can be crucial to good performance. Practice is actually the purposeful repetition of actions until they are perfected, i.e., remembered in bodily form instantaneously, and repeated without conscious effort. An athlete who achieves this is not condemned for the result. On the contrary, they are poised to achieve the victory their well-practiced skill allows them to expect and deserve.
The warrior who thus remembers with his body the movements required to strike and ward off blows is more likely to win. Is Aristotle simply wrong, then, when he makes the mind’s foresight the litmus test for those who are masters by nature? It’s best not to answer this question hastily. For the warrior’s training presupposes information about past battles, information about which moves proved most effective in attacking or defending against the foe. The memory of what worked and what didn’t lives and dies with individuals unless their experience is set down and conveyed in a form that transcends their bodily existence.
This is the form of memory that begins as journals and chronicles of experience, and ends up as the form of knowledge we call history. That word brings to mind tomes of information systematically laid out by intellectuals according to categories and concepts of human activity intended to make sense of what otherwise seems to be, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth puts it, “a tale told by an idiot…signifying nothing.” History is the product of a mind that remembers the past in the sense that Santayana speaks of. Without it repetition is as likely as not to produce results that take no account of human existence, much less human victories and defeats.
Yet given what we now know of the body’s way of remembering, the body is itself an historical record, of sorts. When the heart remembers to beat, when the pancreas remember to secrete, when the nerves remember to communicate the signals that give rise to the body’s life-expressing, life-preserving functions, doesn’t information, as it is conveyed and acted upon, produce a result at least as intelligible as the historian’s tomes, if not (in terms of our modern science) more so? The information that informs a warrior’s preparation for battle is the result of an intelligent remembrance of battle, in light of the desired result (victory). In like fashion, doesn’t the body’s information remember the organism in light of the desired result, which is the preservation of its life?
The question is, of course, which being remembers living things intelligently in this way, pre-serving them before they even exist?
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:16)
From this perspective, what God remembers is the history of what we were before we came to be. But if the good of our bodies is thus remembered, for the sake of life, why is it not sensible to conclude that the good of human life, as such, is preserved in such remembrance. This means that there are “laws of nature and of nature’s God” intended to preserve the whole meaning of our humanity, guiding our moral will as the natural (physical) laws of a different sort prescribe our bodily functions, but with the same purpose: to preserve us, such as we truly are.
In good health, the natural law of our body’s life is God, remembering us. As He does so, our exercise of unalienable rights is us, remembering God.
Isn’t this what America’s founding generation took for granted? For what sane reason do we now reject it?