Filling In the Gaps

The part of Hegel’s writing that stood out most to me was on page 103; the entire first paragraph made the most sense out all the readings we were assingned. I was reeled in after the first line when Hegel says “ …the course of the worlds history has been marked out in its general features”. As I read on that first line began to make more and more sense. My “ah-ha” moment came when Hegel told the story of the blind man using his imagination for his entire life to make up the world, then on the day he regained sight he was disappointed to see that the world didn’t turn out how his imagination made it out to be. The reason this made so much sense is because we don’t know all the details of history. We know the facts, or in other worlds we know “general features”, the stuff that happens between those facts are left to our imagination. Ranke told us that we must only use primary sources, and that history may not be colorful and exciting but it must be told how it actually happened. To make history more exciting we tend to use our imagination to fill in the gaps. But what if we filled in the gaps, creating this history that was exciting and thrilling, just to gain our sight the next day and realize the truth about the gaps. Would we be disappointed like the blind man finding out his world was much better than the actual one? Or would we accept it and move on as if nothing changed? This passage really reminded me of the skit that was performed the first day of class from Assassins. This skit got the entire class thinking. What was really going through Oswald’s mind and why did he really become an assassin? When the gaps are filled the perspective changes, instead of looking at the “general features” look between them and you may be surprised or disappointed, like the blind man, in what you find out. Reading Hegel really made me realize that sometimes the things you make up using your imagination are much better than the truth. In a way I never really thought about the fact that I use my imagination to fill in the gaps between the general features, to me what I have made up makes sense to me and that’s the way I see it. But what I see (or make up to fill the gaps) is most likely different than what other people see since no ones imagination is the same. This is another reason why Ranke is right, if we use primary sources we will have a better chance of avoiding the imaginative things people have made up to fill in the gaps. The primary sources will gives us the general features that we need in order to tell the Worlds History “from East to West.”