History - National Rapsode or Critical Awareness of Yourself?

It says: Fatvera Jonuzaj 

I was incidentally attracted by the name of a café in one of Pristina's most busy and noisy areas.

A French name: Coffee de Flore. I immediately remembered the famous Parisan café that bears the same name, a meeting place for great philosophers, artists, and writers of the 20th century. Sartri's coffee and Deovar, Nobelist Kamy. Their long dialogue in that café gave birth to “The existentialist philophia”, which brought philosophy out of closed university cartels to turn the public into passion.

Curiosity moved me in. What I found there impressed me - a warm environment, numerous books, and walls decorated with modern art paintings.

I got permission from the waiter to look up the books on shelves. They were books of philosophy and history. During the browser, I noticed a work previously unknown to me from Plato: dialogue “Joni”. I decided to sit down, order a cup of coffee, and dive into the reading.

Dialogue develops between Socrates and a rhapsod named Jon.

Since philosophy is a discipline that operates through concepts, my mind immediately went to the word <x0rapsod”. Where does she come from? What does it originally represent?

Rapsod is derived from the old Greek ʹ from “So the rhapsaud was “thrower” a poet singing stories by mouth. The Rapsods, in ancient Greece, played an important role in educating the people. They were collective memory carriers.

But philosophy, especially what starts with Socrat, questions these bearers of ancient knowledge. In “Jonin”, Socrates argues that the true knowledge does not come from the Rapods, but from critical thinking. Rapsody, he says, has no literal knowledge of what he says. It is only a transmitter for a divine “inspiration”, but it does not understand the essence of what it conveys. Because the essence of things is captured only through conceptual thinking.

This is an essential act of age - based oral culture, a culture of reason and philosophical analysis. Plato, in his works, goes further: There is no room in his ideal country for poets, since they often confuse emotion with truth. Today, too, we are within this Platonic distinction: When judging for the truth, we must put our emotions aside.

While I was thinking about this predigma shift in ancient Greece, I naturally thought of Albanians. How are we teaching our children her history and truths?

Unfortunately, we have failed.

History, in our educational system, is taught as a chronice of events, without epistemological depth. We learn the dates, names, events, but not the structures and meanings that produce these events. We don't teach history as the process of producing truth, but as a ready confession, no space for doubt. So without realizing it, we slip into mythology.

School has failed. The university too. We are not forming critical historians, but chronics that merely reproduce a served nymph.

And as a result, others should write our story, as it did in the past. Because we have not created a culture to think of history as epistemology, as a deep and critical method of understanding the past, to influence the present, and to design the future.

On that cool evening, in a small Pristina café, reading an ancient Greek dialogue, I faced a question that still bothers me:

Will we ever be able to conceive of history rather than just remember it poeticly and historically?

To make history and its truths beneficial. And to be such, history cannot continue as a national rhapsod, but only as a critical awareness that helps us to get to know ourselves and to know ourselves so that we can become masters of our destiny in this part of the world where we live.