[September 2003 journal entry]
Studying the history of ideas can leave a person with an inability to make sound life judgments (i.e., ‘insane’) when the study is conducted without an unbreakable link with concrete life realities/circumstances. The history of ideas is an ever-expanding and never-exhausted/mastered field of inquiry. Without the existential link, studying the history of ideas can easily be(come) analogous to being lost in a maze and no longer searching for an exit. The existential link for me formed with my experience at the side of my first wife (d. 1987) as she was irreversibly defeated over fourteen years by multiple sclerosis. The link continues to today for me through efforts daily – both personally and professionally –to seek fresh ways to see ‘from below’.
