The rarity of silence – or – what can we hear from history

Abstract

The present article gives a short analysis of emerging of historical knowledge and its relations to human senses. People are re-constructing history using different cognitive strategies and different approaches to how to use our ability to see, to hear and to touch. People are historically deaf and disabled – we cannot hear an enormous part of our history, and in terms of understanding the world we may learn from really disabled persons – who are fully capable to create images of the surrounding reality accurately and adequately. During the past decades, due to the great development of technology, we have become more powerful in recording and re-constructing our reality – but what have we lost? Proliferation of sounds creates noise and is a big disturbance in some situations – we change our psychological way of being more rapidly than our physiology could accept that change. A myriad of sounds in the present gives us cause to search for the same domain in the past and to describe it in terms of sounds and hearing. Sometimes we do not have enough will and wish to hear our contemporary that we extend our vision and our hearing into the past – but what can we hear from that?