By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
What made it possible for man (or humanity as a whole) to produce culture and write narratives (mythological, poetic, etc.) and, in particular, the historical narrative? For this question to be minimally answered, it is necessary that we know what time is. history , given that anyone who studies or has an interest in history and culture needs to have a basic understanding of this concept.
The time history differs from time natural, that is, of time that is constitutive of physical and biological nature. Thus, the study of disciplines such as geology, astronomy or natural history gives us an overview of what the “history” of the Universe, the planet Earth and the forms of life that developed on that same planet are; themes that permeate the notion of time natural.
Historical time is that which is perceived and absorbed by human beings, which is part of human development and its spheres of organization, that is, the economy, politics, society and the culture. Some philosophers and many theorists of history postulate that the way in which man faces time is the most painful compared to that of any other animal. This is because man has conscience da own death . Man knows that he is going to die and it was the awareness of this fact that led him to erect the great civilizations.
The first prehistoric symbols and all the rites and myths of primitive cultures set the tone for this way of looking at the passage of time, which takes everything and corrodes everything. The use of the river metaphor is frequent; myths that portray a mighty river that destroys everything. At the origin of philosophy, including the Greek Heraclitus he used this metaphor to explain the intuition he developed about time:“a man cannot bathe twice in the same river”. This means that “man will not be the same and neither will the river. Everything passes.”
The intuition of change, as well as permanent things (moral laws, political principles, etc.), is one of the main characteristics of historical time. It is this way of intuiting time that led man to develop historical consciousness and the need to record events, so that they would not “get lost in time”, so that they would not “fall into oblivion”, as one who is considered the “father of history”, the Greek Herodotus.