Rewriting the Past — The Fact Cannot Be Changed, but the Meaning Can Be Rewritten by Today's Judgement

"If only that one incident had not happened, I would have walked a different life" — when we murmur this, we are quietly mixing two claims. One: resenting the fact of the past. The other: being bound by the meaning we have given to the past. The fact, indeed, cannot be changed. But the meaning — the interpretation we render today against the same fact — can be. This volume gently untangles, through five traditions — Frankl, Adler, Ricoeur, Buddhist dependent origination, and Nietzsche — what it is to "rewrite the past."

01"Blame It on the Past" — a Common Misreading

Everyone thinks at some point: "if only I hadn't been assigned that supervisor"; "if only I hadn't made that mistake"; "if only I had noticed sooner." In the pharmaceutical field too, similar muttered phrases about past career choices, past failures, past relationships are not unusual. These mutterings share a common structure — the premise that the past fact directly determines the present self.

This premise is, in fact, dubious. Because there are countless cases of two people who experienced the same past living utterly different presents. Seeing the same pharmaceutical disaster, some leave the industry; others find a calling there and remain. Under the same harsh supervisor, some are crushed; others feel the lifelong master. The past is the same, the present is different. What makes the difference is not the past itself but the meaning given to the past.

02Frankl's "Will to Meaning" — The Fact Does Not Change, the Meaning Changes

Among twentieth-century psychologists, the one who treated the relation of past and meaning from the most extreme situation was the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997). Surviving the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, he recorded his own experience with the eye of a medical observer in Man's Search for Meaning (German original 1946: Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager).

"Everything can be taken from a human being but one — the freedom to choose what attitude to take in any given set of circumstances. That freedom alone cannot be taken away." — paraphrase of Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)

What Frankl saw in the camps was the fact that people placed in the same circumstances followed utterly different spiritual paths. The survival conditions were nearly identical. Mortality rates were statistically similar. Yet some retained, to the very end, their dignity as human beings. Frankl named the trait they shared the "will to meaning" (Wille zum Sinn). The fact (the circumstance) cannot be changed. But the attitude toward the circumstance — the meaning found there — can be one's own to the end.

Here is the central proposition of the logotherapy Frankl systematised after the war. The human being lives in pursuit of meaning, not of pleasure or power. Meaning is not something reality gives; it is something the human being offers to reality — this is the prototype Frankl left of a new relation with the past.

03Adler's "Teleology" — The Past Is Subordinate to Present Purpose, Not Its Cause

Half a century before Frankl, in the same Vienna, Alfred Adler (1870–1937) had arrived at the same place by a different route. Adler read human behaviour not by causal theory but by teleology. Not "the past cause decides the present" but "the present purpose chooses the meaning of the past."

"Experience itself is not the cause of success or failure. We are not shocked by experience; from within experience we extract what fits our purpose and give meaning to it." — paraphrase of Alfred Adler, What Life Should Mean to You (1931)

Adler's proposition has often been misunderstood. He is not saying "the events of the past have no influence." What he is saying is that from the same past, depending on present purpose, infinitely different "meanings" can be drawn. "To go on conveniently resenting the past so that one can keep fleeing from failure" is one choice. "To reinterpret the past conveniently so that what was learned from failure lives in today" is another. In both, the purpose chooses the meaning.

In the pharmaceutical field, whether a past review mistake becomes "evidence of one's limits" or "a source of learning" is not decided by the past fact itself. Today's purpose — how one wants to live — chooses the meaning of the past mistake. In Adlerian terms, the past is not a force that pushes us from behind but the raw material to which we continue, by today's judgement, to give meaning.

04Ricoeur's "Narrative Self" — We Are Retelling the Past Now

The French contemporary philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), from the 1980s into the 1990s, established the perspective of grasping the self as narrative (récit). In Time and Narrative (1983–85) and Oneself as Another (1990), he states — we are not fixed substances; by continuing to tell our own life, we become ourselves.

"Narrative identity (identité narrative) lies in the dialectic of the same identity (idem), which does not change, and the selfhood (ipse), which continues to be the same while changing." — paraphrase of Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (1990)

What Ricoeur points out is that when we tell about our own past, we are not playing back recorded fact as is, but each time, the present I, in the present context, am editing the past. About the same event, the I of the twenties, of the forties, of the sixties tell utterly different stories. The fact does not change, yet the story changes. Because the teller has changed.

This is different from "lying." It is not the convenient distortion of the past, but the redistribution of the weights of meaning of the past within the present context. In the pharmaceutical field, the fact "I was raised by a strict supervisor" — what in one's twenties was told as "it was unreasonable" — may, in later years, be retold as "it built the foundation of my ethical sense." The fact (being strictly trained) is identical. But the story (the arrangement of meaning) is being reviewed from the present self. What Ricoeur teaches is that the past is not frozen in memory; in our present telling, it is being rewritten, a little each day.

05Buddhist "Dependent Origination" — The Past Is Not Cause but Condition

The Eastern lineage illuminates this problem from one step deeper. The core Buddhist worldview, pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination), grasps every phenomenon not as a single causal line but as the interdependence of countless conditions.

"When this is, that is. When this arises, that arises. When this is not, that is not. When this ceases, that ceases." — basic formula of dependent origination, from the Samyukta Āgama

Seen through the worldview of dependent origination, the single-line causation "past event A produces present self B" is already a coarse reading. In reality, A conditions B; it does not determine it. Between A and B, countless other conditions cross — subsequent events, relationships with others, one's own choices, the social context. The past is not a cause that unilaterally determines the present but is no more than one of countless conditions that constitute the present.

This view does not deny the responsibility of the past. Rather, it is a liberation from the simple causal theory that puts too much weight on the past alone. In the pharmaceutical field, the past organisational culture and the history of pharmaceutical disasters indeed condition the present. But condition is not determination. The judgement we render today, as a collaboration of past condition and present choice, newly conditions the future. This is the way of relating to the past in dependent origination.

06Not Loosing the Second Arrow — The Dual Structure of "Suffering" in Buddhism

Buddhism has another parable that strikes the essence of the past–meaning relation. The second arrow. In the Buddha's teaching transmitted in the Samyukta Āgama:

"The ordinary person, after receiving the first arrow of pain, looses upon himself a second arrow — lament, sorrow, anger, self-blame. The wise person receives the pain of the first arrow, but does not loose the second arrow." — gist from the Salla Sutta (Samyukta Āgama, "Parable of the Arrow")

What the Buddha points out is the fact that most of human suffering arises from the second arrow — that is, not the fact itself, but one's own interpretation, reaction, and rumination toward the fact. A past mistake is the first arrow. The rumination "I am no good"; "there is no recovering this now"; "that one incident changed my life" — these are the second arrows one continues to loose upon oneself.

To rewrite the past is not to erase the fact of the first arrow. The first arrow indeed struck. Fact is fact. What can be rewritten is the choice of whether to continue loosing the second arrow. In the pharmaceutical field, in the moment when rumination over a past event will not stop, ask — is this the pain of the first arrow, or the second arrow I keep loosing upon myself? Reducing the second arrow by one is also one form of rewriting the past.

07Nietzsche's "Amor Fati" — The Stage Where One Can Say "So Be It" to Everything

In the Western philosophical lineage, as the ultimate attitude toward the past, there is Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) amor fati (love of fate). Repeated in Ecce Homo (1888) and The Gay Science (1882), it is one of the destinations of his philosophy.

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, and still less to hide it — all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary — but to love it." — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888)

Nietzsche's amor fati is often misread as "resignation" or "passive acceptance." It is not. It is the attitude of actively affirming every event of the past — joy, suffering, failure, injustice — as an indispensable component of one's present. "If that had not happened, the present me would not be. So I affirm it" — this is the logic of amor fati.

To bring amor fati into the pharmaceutical field is not to affirm past wrongs uncritically. Rather, it is the resolve, having taken on the whole of the past, still to face forward. The history of past pharmaceutical disasters cannot be made not to have happened. Past mistakes of one's own cannot be erased. But all of them can be taken on as the material that makes the present self. The moment one takes them on, the past changes from a burden into a foundation.

08For Whom Is the Past There? — From Kamo no Chōmei to Contemporary Psychology

In Hōjōki (1212), Kamo no Chōmei opened with: "The flow of the going river is unbroken, yet the water is no longer what it was." All flows on; nothing is twice the same — one apex Japanese prose reached for the Buddhist view of impermanence.

Contemporary psychology has backed this intuition from another angle. Research on reconsolidation in neuroscience shows that each time a memory is retrieved, it becomes momentarily unstable and, in the process of being fixed again, is being rewritten little by little. The "unchanging past" does not exist neurologically either. We are reconstructing the past, daily.

How to live this fact? Ricoeur said "retell"; Frankl said "find meaning"; Nietzsche said "affirm"; Buddhism said "observe dependent origination and impermanence." Every tradition depicts the past not as something passively shouldered but as something with which one actively relates by present judgement. This is not the imposition of fiction but the sincere response to the fact that the human heart is actually moving this way.

09"Rewriting the Past" in the Pharmaceutical Field — Reconstructing the Meaning of Failure

Let us bring the abstract down to the field. What is the past for the reviewer? It includes — past oversights of one's own, past judgements one issued, past misunderstandings with supervisors and colleagues, the past history of pharmaceutical harm of the industry as a whole, past compliance cases the organisation has gone through — all these layers.

In every case, the fact does not change. What changes is the interpretation today's self renders to that fact, and the action that begins from that interpretation. "Rewriting the past" is not self-deception. It is the work of today's self drawing meaning honestly anew from the material called the past.

10Four Movements for Rewriting the Past by Today's Judgement

To bring the same place to which the five traditions pointed down into daily practice, four movements are set here.

The fact cannot be changed. But the meaning — by today's judgement, to offer new meaning to all the facts of the past — can be. Frankl, Adler, Ricoeur, Buddhist dependent origination and the second arrow, Nietzsche — five traditions pointed, in different words, to the same place. The past is not a fixed record but raw material with which the present self continues, each day, to engage.

"If only that one incident had not happened" — when you are about to murmur this, gently continue. "Because that one incident happened, I am now living this way." The fact is the same. The meaning can be rewritten by today's judgement.