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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Dilthey and Our Lived Experience of the Past

Tuesday 19 November 2024 is the 191st anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833 – 01 October 1911), who was born in Wiesbaden-Biebrich on this date in 1833.

Dilthey has been highly influential in the philosophy of history, but mostly as a critic. His thought it difficult to pigeonhole. Robert C. Scharff has called Dilthey’s work, “non-analytical, unspeculative philosophy of History,” which distances him from the familiar distinction between analytical and speculative philosophies of history. In this episode I focus on Dilthey’s conception of lived experience in relation to time and history.

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/dilthey-on-our-lived-experience-of

Video:              https://youtu.be/1t6WMm6RK9g  

Podcast:          https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/uAaEtGUqEOb

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The Return of Biology through the Spirit of Survival

The Mind’s Debt to Nature.—The ancient compact of mind and world, signed in blood by both parties when life was in its infancy and had no agency but to hunt or be hunted, constitutes the framework within which the mind, now grown to self-awareness and intelligence, still acts out its primordial role. What the mind owes to nature is the exaction of natural selection—to survive and to reproduce, and to do so marginally better than a rival mind, also seeking to survive and reproduce, but claiming for itself the same resources that now must be disputed between the two. This disputation is a war to the knife the mind owes the world as a consequence of its emergence from biological being. This role has its origins in strictly biological survival and reproduction, but the mind, by intervening in the surviving and in the reproducing, emerges with these as its imperatives—transmuted and transformed sub specie cognitatis. What is it for the mind to transform its biological imperatives into cognitive imperatives? What is it, or what would it be, for mind to serve mind as it has served the body? This would be to see itself for what it is. The mind owes to nature its being, while nature owes the mind nothing. To discharge its debt to nature, the still primordial mind must justify itself as mind, must raise itself above the biology that is its origin, and assert the rights and responsibilities of mind independent of biology. To bear the painful revelations entailed by such self-knowledge, the mind must call upon all those resources of survival sharpened over hundreds of millions of years, which, as it turns out, since these moral reserves are necessary to self-knowledge, were not and are not indifferent to the ultimate self-assertion of the mind. Biology is the necessary precondition of a ruthless objectivity.  

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Friday 15 November 2024

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 315

Non-Integrated Industrial Production

…in which I discuss civilizational collapse, non-integrated industrialism, the SS Savannah, entelechy, evo-devo, deep homology, appropriate technology, Khyber Pass copies, bespoke manufacturing, Kenneth Clark, Ulfberht swords, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and roundabout production…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/non-integrated-industrial-production

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/non-integrated-industrial-production-d9b61f0c8a45

Reddit: https://new.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1gts764/nonintegrated_industrial_production/

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Our Epistemic Entitlement to Knowledge

Nature’s Debt to the Mind.—The intuition that objects ought to afford us knowledge, that they somehow owe us knowledge of their nature, is the epistemic entitlement by which we seek to collect the debt that nature owes to the mind. Science is the shady collection agency we employ to recover the debt. Its methods aren’t always such as would want to discuss in polite society, but mostly the job gets done. The knowledge that escapes the debt-collector’s regime becomes the occasion of what we may call science of the gaps. The gaps in our knowledge must be filled, by hook or my crook, for knowledge to be whole in our pursuit of epistemic totality. That objects still hold themselves aloof from us, and resist the mind’s ineffectual blandishments, is merely a spur to more vigorous collection efforts, which unfortunately yield diminishing returns as we seek to fill the gaps through ever more aggressive means. The earnestness with which Hilbert insisted, “Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen,” has ceased to express any jejune charm, and now betrays a certain unpleasant brusqueness, if not more than a hint of desperation. To no avail. Nature owes us nothing. Not knowledge. Certainly not comfort. What we secure for ourselves in spite of indifferent nature is ours to call our own. To enjoy this in good conscience is the interest the mind pays to itself for having secured that which the exactions of knowledge required.   

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Zinsser’s Naturalistic History of Infectious Disease

Sunday 17 November 2024 is the 146th anniversary of the birth of Hans Zinsser (17 November 1878 – 04 September 1940), who was born in New York City on this date in 1878.

Zinsser is the author of Rats, Lice and History, which is an account of history in terms of infectious disease—specially, typhus, which he wrote about as though it were an individual, and as if he were writing a biography—the biography of a disease. In the way of writing a biography of typhus, Zinsser presented a big picture account of human history that is thoroughly naturalistic.

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/zinssers-naturalistic-history-of

Video:              https://youtu.be/BhN7BrWvcbg  

Podcast:          https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/gnI04ii2AOb

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Beyond Objectivity and Below Subjectivity

Transcendental Formalism.—The aspiration for history to be a science constituted in naïve positivity has been the will-o’-the-wisp that has distracted some historians from the possibility of a shared foundation of historical knowledge that would be the foundation for any knowledge whatsoever. Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert postulated a distinct method for history, still capable of scientific rigor, but not the method of the empirical sciences, and not the rigor of the empirical sciences. This is another distraction. Both are attempts to grasp from the outside that which is known for what it is only from within—even more so in the case of idiographic particularity as compared to nomothetic regularity. The mathematical formalisms expressing the inner truth of physical bodies come closer to fundamental reality than the contingent details that differentiate historical individuals. Husserl noted, “…what is a mutual externality from the point of view of naïve positivity or objectivity is, when seen from the inside, an intentional mutual internality.” (Crisis, section 71) Approaching the problem from a specifically historical perspective, Collingwood understood an aspect of this, holding that historical events must be known from their inside, but his conception of internality fell short of a foundation that could mutually constitute disjoint bodies of knowledge. What is required is an internality that transcends subjectivity, and in attaining this transcendence there is the possibility of a formalism that transcends objectivity. A formalism to express historical events would capture their distinctiveness better than the most painstaking exterior description, but converging upon mutuality internality—an internality sufficiently fundamental that it equally underlies disciplines as diverse as the empirical and social sciences—lies beyond (or below) the internality that is the complement of objectivity.

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Friday 08 November 2024

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 314

Boundary Conditions for Life in Successive Biospheres

…in which I discuss the K-Pg impact, mass extinction, retained complexity, Evo-Devo, deep homology, origins of life, reestablishing the trophic pyramid, hydrothermal vents, and successive biospheres…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/boundary-conditions-for-life-in-successive

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/boundary-conditions-for-life-in-successive-biospheres-d960f02c2037

Reddit: https://new.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1goe4kk/boundary_conditions_for_life_in_successive/

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The Source of Our Deracination

Existential Security.—An Egyptian alive during the 13th dynasty of the Middle Kingdom found himself in a civilization already a thousand years old, and looking forward to another millennium or more. A Minoan of the Middle Minoan period similarly found himself in the midst of a thousand year old civilization, with another thousand years yet to go. These societies were permanent for all practical purposes. For as many generations as you might go back into the past, life would have been essentially the same, and for as many generations as you might go into the future, life would remain essentially the same. There were ups and downs, invasions and conquests, years of plenty and years of want, but one dynasty followed another in an orderly succession down through the centuries. Life had a perennial quality, much like life in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization—a period much longer than that of all civilizations combined. This was the human condition, but it is no longer. We do not know what it is like to live in a stable, mature civilization; we do not know what it is like to live in a long-lived civilization; we do not know what it is like to have a tradition continuously observed over a thousand years, and which will continue after us for another thousand years. While civilization in some form or another has existed for ten thousand years on Earth, the rapid churning of recent history has left us without existential security, without the experience of a perennial way of life. This, as much as anything, accounts for our deracination, our disconnectedness from the mainstream of human life. The past is a foreign country because we are expatriates from the world that made us what we are.  

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Saint Augustine on the Two Cities  

Wednesday 13 November 2024 is the 1,670th anniversary of the birth of Saint Augustine (13 November 354 - 28 August 430), who areas born Aurelius Augustinus in Thagaste, in the province of Numidia, then part of the Roman Empire, now part of Algeria, on this date in 354 AD.

Saint Augustine has been one of the most influential figures in Western Christendom, named a father and a doctor of the church, and whose pervasive influence can be seen in philosophy of theology. But while his City of God has been read for more than a thousand years, and the providential conception of history he propounded continues to be influential, his philosophy of history remains underappreciated to this day. 

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/saint-augustine-on-the-two-cities

Video:              https://youtu.be/5FfWfxWqlnA  

Podcast:          https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/LaLWxmh1vOb

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Consciousness is the world mirrored back on itself.

Monadic Consciousness.—The reach of memory is confined to the scope of a single lifetime of a single consciousness. Consciousness opens a reflexive window onto the world that would not otherwise exist, but this window that connects the world to itself by mirroring a part of the world, is itself opaque to every other consciousness. It is language that makes it possible to bridge the chasm between monadic consciousness, each isolated like a singularity within its event horizon, but the linguistic bridge is constructed at the cost of immediacy: the communicated experience is not experienced, but inferred and reconstructed on the basis of this inference. What are the formal constraints on this inference? This is a question we could at least attempt to answer, even if it hasn’t yet been answered. Collingwood’s project was predicated upon the ability to reconstruct the thoughts of past historical agents, but Collingwood offered no methodology for his a priori historical imagination, and no rules for the reconstruction of experience from records. This limit seems to be defined by the human condition, at least the human condition as a conscious being. But technology has repeatedly changed the constraints of the human condition. It is possible that, just as the technology of language facilitated bridging the chasm that separates one subjectivity from another, some future technology could bridge this chasm in a new way that preserved the immediacy of experience, extending the reach of memory beyond the scope of a single life, expanding consciousness and so expanding history.  

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

The Destruction of the Indies according to de las Casas

Monday 11 November 2024 is the 540th birthday of Bartolomé de las Casas (11 November 1484 – 18 July 1566), who was born in Seville on this date in 1484.

Bartolomé de las Casas arrived at Hispaniola as a young man, became a Dominican friar, and thereafter was a tireless advocate of the native peoples of the Americas, writing a scathing account of the Spanish in the New World in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The issues he raised have only become more prominent since his time.

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-destruction-of-the-indies-according

Video:              https://youtu.be/fL5X36dY53s  

Podcast:          https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/RfdDEorRsOb

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The One-Many Problem in the Metaphysics of History

The Thesis of the Unity of the Past.—We remember the past and we reconstruct the past. Another’s remembered past is our reconstructed past, and others must reconstruct that which we have ourselves experienced and now remember. The remembered past as recorded exists in a twilight of memory and artifact—the memory of one and the artifact of others. Overlapping memories and artifacts together constitute history, interpenetrating each other so that they constitute an organic whole. That we intuitively integrate the separate threads of the past into one and only one past, and that we assume this without the realization that we are making a claim we cannot justify, betrays an unspoken metaphysics of history. What a priori principle determines that memory and reconstruction are one and the same reality? Why are not the two—memory and reconstruction—the basis of a discontinuity in the world that fragments the past into many, rather than being unified as one? Why not two histories, one remembered and one reconstructed? Why not many reconstructed histories, one for every reconstructed milieu? Even within our own minds the many threads of the remembered past do not always perfectly converge. Why not many remembered pasts? We naturally posit the thesis of the unity of the past because the alternative is, for the most part incomprehensible. The one-many problem in the metaphysics of history comes down to this question: is history one or many? The answer to this question is that we require this theoretical presupposition as postulate for the reconstruction of human history—a history we are capable of reconstructing, capable of comprehending, and capable of accepting as the framework for our lives. Yet, like all theoretical presuppositions, the thesis of the unity of the past is an idealization and therefore a simplification of the complexity of the world. We reconstruct our history on the basis of this ideal framework, but this ideal first needs to be made explicit, and then it must be articulated to comprehend alternatives, whether or not these alternatives are realized in actuality.

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Schiller’s Romantic Rational Reconstruction of History

Sunday 10 November 2024 is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (10 November 1759 – 09 May 1805), who was born in Marbach am Neckar, in the Duchy of Württemberg, on this date in 1759.

We could call Schiller a “renaissance man” because of his many accomplishments—poet, playwright, historian, and philosopher—but really we should call him an “Enlightenment man” or “romantic man,” because he was a man of his age, but he’s also a “universal man” in the sense sometimes attributed to the renaissance man, and as a universal man he gave a famous lecture on universal history.

Quora:             https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/schillers-romantic-rational-reconstruction

Video:              https://youtu.be/R-NOkRuyv-s  

Podcast:          https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/Z6fH16VQqOb

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Transcendental Foundations of Knowledge

History in Naïve Positivity.—That the special sciences are formulated in an attitude of naïve positivity was Husserl’s contention, meaning that the knowledge of familiar natural sciences lacked a transcendental foundation, which could only be provided by phenomenology. This view has little or no traction outside phenomenology, but the core of the idea is, or can be made, independent of the specific phenomenological program for providing a transcendental foundation for scientific knowledge. Once we grasp the paradoxical notion of a non-naturalistic natural science, we can entertain any number of possible non-naturalistic formulations of scientific foundations. Indeed, we can draw upon the entire idealist tradition, going back to Plato or before, as an historical template for understanding the struggle to provide a foundation for scientific knowledge independent of empirical science, which cannot found itself without being any less paradoxical than non-naturalistic natural science. But all this is mere prelude to the imperative to frame a transcendental foundation of knowledge that is not limited to empirical science, but can with equal rigor provide the foundation for all that is not strictly empirical in the narrow sense. A transcendental foundation for the empirical sciences is low-hanging fruit compared to a transcendental foundation for those bodies of knowledge that have not yet, even in our time, received a formal exposition. History, too, demands a transcendental foundation if it is to rise above its oft-expressed ambition to be founded as a science in naïve positivity. Even this modest aim has eluded the historians, which leaves this body of knowledge pristine in a way that empirical science is not, and so an ideal candidate for a non-naturalistic transcendental foundations.   

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Quigley on the Evolution of Civilizations

Saturday 09 November 2024 is the 114th anniversary of the birth of Carroll Quigley (09 November 1910 – 03 January 1977), who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on this date in 1910.

An influential teacher of many influential students, Quigley’s distinctive work on history and civilization build on the earlier work of Toynbee, but Quigley is explicitly and sharply critical of Toynbee, and explains how the framework he formulated is an improvement that offers a fruitful perspective for historical analysis and the study of civilization.  

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/quigley-on-the-evolution-of-civilizations

Video:              https://youtu.be/2Rtk9m9G6VI   

Podcast:          https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/HjbH11qfpOb    

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The Selection Problem in History

The Power Set of History.—That the historian must select that which he includes in his history from a much larger pool of evidence that is not included we could call the selection problem in history, and a biased selection of historical evidence is widely recognized, under whatever name, as a potential failure of historical objectivity. How large is the pool of historical evidence from which historians draw? Carroll Quigley wrote that, “…it should require only a moment’s thought to recognize that the facts of the past are infinite, and the possible arrangements of any selection from these facts are equally numerous.” I would not frame this problem in terms of facts, but, given this framing, several interesting consequences follow for history. An infinite set can be put in one-to-one correspondence with a proper part of itself, so even if an infinitely long history could be written, an infinitude of distinct infinitistic histories could be written, meaning that even an infinitely detailed history would not be the only possible history. Further, given an infinite set of historical facts, the power set of these historical facts (the set of all subsets of historical facts) has the cardinal of the continuum. This means that not only is there the possibility of an infinite number of distinct infinitistic histories, but that the set of these histories is uncountably infinite. Another question is the size of the infinite set of historical facts, i.e., what is the cardinality of the set of historical facts? Is this a countable infinity or an uncountable infinity, and if uncountable, how high up is it in the infinite hierarchy of cardinals? Does history represent an inaccessible cardinal? And, perhaps at the most fundamental level, there is the question of how exactly we decompose the continuous world into individual and discontinuous facts—but the actual infinitude of the world is a distinct metaphysical thesis that must be separately demonstrated.

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Friday 01 November 2024

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 313

Boundary Conditions for Cosmology

…in which I discuss simulating alien skies, the boundary conditions of cosmology, observational sophistication, the cosmological principle, SETI, the Great Filter, the principle of mediocrity, and yet another “solution” to the Fermi paradox…  

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/boundary-conditions-for-cosmology

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/boundary-conditions-of-cosmology-aa4d285d7a90

Reddit: https://new.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1gkpgpm/boundary_conditions_for_cosmology/