I wrote two paragraphs recently that mark an important shift in my thinking. What I have been calling the Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus would better be called the Tractatus Epico-Poeticus.
This has two important advantages. First, I've never liked the way it sounds when "logical" is replaced with "pathetic", as in "a pathetic picture of the acts". "Epic" has a nicer ring to it. Also, "epic" and "logical" can both be traced back to a root in speech. Their indication of "reason" and "passion" comes later in world-history.
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“The world is everything that is the case,” Wittgenstein famously began his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “the totality of facts, not things.” I have often imagined a, let us say, Tractatus Epico-Poeticus that begins, “History is everything that happens, the totality of acts, not people.” It is not merely the story of us all, but of all that we have done. Like the world, it is comprehensive; it doesn’t leave anyone out. Even the most marginalized people are marginalized by history; even the most forgotten are forgotten, precisely, by history. The most ordinary lives are part of history because it reaches right up to the present, the present moment of our entirely practical lives. It presents itself to us through the needs and demands of the people around us. “What is the case is that there are states of affairs,” said Wittgenstein. “A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).” Without facts, if things were not the case, they would just be lying around every which way, adding up to nothing. Likewise, if everyone just minded their own business there would be no history. History is everyone who is on my case.
“Writing as Freedom is therefore a mere moment,” said Barthes. “But this moment is one of the most explicit in History, since History is always and above all a choice and the limits of that choice.” Every time a writer sits down to compose a deliberate paragraph, history is articulating itself. A mind asserts its freedom to think and appreciates its finitude. For a moment, all the pressures of life (the totality of which just is History) are suspended — the desk is cleared — simply because the writer has chosen to arrange some words on a page for a few minutes. The words will be the writer’s free choice and they will be put in the order the writer chooses; anything can happen. But not everything; the writer has also, no less freely, chosen a theme and a genre, something to write about and someone to read it. This is a choice of limits, as was the practical matter of writing the paragraph between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning. All over the world, writing like this is happening as we speak. These moments are perhaps the most explicit in history.
