“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Sarmiento on the Conflict between Civilization and Barbarism
Saturday 15 February 2025 is the 214th anniversary of the birth of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (15 February 1811 – 11 September 1888), who was born in Carrascol, a suburb of San Juan, in north central Argentina, on this date in 1811.
Sarmiento was the seventh president of Argentina and the author of one of the great works of Latin American prose, Life in the Argentine Republic in the days of the Tyrants; or, Barbarism and Civilization. For Sarmiento, cities were the bastion of civilization and the countryside of barbarism, and the Argentine tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas had risen up from rural barbarism to threaten civilization in Argentina. I examine some of Sarmiento’s presuppositions about the relation of the countryside to 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/sarmiento-on-the-conflict-between
Video: https://youtu.be/GJy2t9kRpno
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3L6V7L5eDYX7rhhj0XRRmG?si=TsmRqrSeSXaxEcNVq8QSjw
Episode: S02EP11
The Reconstruction of the Synchronic Present as Diachronic Sequence
Historical Modes of Thought.—What is or what would constitute a distinctive mode of historical thought? Some would say it was Ranke who formalized historical method and professionalized the discipline, but much of Ranke’s method was already implicitly present in early modern histories, as with Étienne Pasquier, discussed by Paul Veyne in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Critical textual studies date all the way back to Lorenzo Valla, who proved the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery in the early fifteenth century. The formalization of text criticism is a means to an end, and the end is the reconstruction of past time from evidence available in the present. In other words, the historical mode of thought is the reconstruction of synchronic evidence as diachronic sequence. Collingwood’s a priori historical imagination is a method of reconstruction in the light of ellipses in the historical record. Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences is the weighting of an event in reconstructed time in relation to another event in reconstructed time, the better to produce a diachronic sequence. Varve chronology and dendrochronoloy are reconstructions of past time facilitated by advances in technology and scientific technique—advances that continue in the form of nuclear dating techniques and DNA sequencing. Again, this begins early with the laws of superposition in Nicolas Steno; the use of advanced technologies tend to overshadow the fact that these are new tools in the old quest to reconstruct the past. Perhaps the most distinctive of methods of historical reconstruction is seriation. Here the historians (or the archaeologists) can claim originality. It could be argued that all historical reconstruction is a form of seriation, because we do not find the events of history in serial order, but must render them in a series, and this is the work of reconstruction—transposing the simultaneous order of the present into the serial order of the past. It is here that we should seek after ideographic rigor.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
The Portland Vase is Vandalized
At 3:45 p.m. on Friday 07 February 1845—180 years ago today—the Portland Vase was destroyed in an act of vandalism. Since that time it has been reassembled and restored several times. The saga of the Portland vase offers us an opportunity to think about the fate of historical artifacts over the longue durée. What will become of them? What will become of us?
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-portland-vase-is-vandalized
Video: https://youtu.be/tqXI6SXmIQs
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jKwENe3ijhqHJaJ4nX6kV?si=Cniwy2CPRHiB9UWr39impQ
Episode: S02EP10
The Pursuit of Ideographic Rigor
Rigor without Revolution.—Because historians, and the histories that they wrote, were passed over by the scientific revolution, there was no inflection point in history that distinguished pre-modern history from modern history, and while the methods of historians gradually and incrementally became more rigorous, there was never a time when the tradition was discontinuous from one generation to the next. The argument could be made that there was a greater transformation in the writing of history in the passage from the ancient to the medieval world than in the passage from the medieval to the modern world. If we are interested in a counterfactual for the intellectual life of Western civilization had its linear development never been preempted by the scientific revolution and then the industrial revolution, we can look to the development of historical thought, which has experienced no revolutions. Instead, history has ever so slowly built on its past, but never enough to introduce a discontinuity into the tradition, and still today we prize histories for the literary qualities, keeping alive the problem of whether history is a science or an art. The possibility of nomothetic rigor denied history for its failure to enter into the spirit of the scientific revolution has left it with the elusive possibility of ideographic rigor. If we view the history of history through this lens, we can trace a wavering line of increasing ideographic rigor from the inception of history in Herodotus to the present day, with two steps forward always followed by one step back. Historians were on their own, without the help of either logicians (whose rigor gave us the formal sciences) or mathematicians (whose rigor informed the natural sciences) in their pursuit of independent canons of ideographic rigor.
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Friday 07 February 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 327
Permutations of Pseudomorphosis
…in which I discuss Oswald Spengler, historical pseudomorphosis, pristine civilizations, Cuneiform, imperialism, Susanne Langer, imposing a template, The Golden Age, and Geoffrey West’s Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies…
Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/permutations-of-pseudomorphosis
Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/permutations-of-pseudomorphosis-8afafb6771f4
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1iltboe/permutations_of_pseudomorphosis/
The Next Big Thing in Philosophy Coming Down the Anti-Metaphysical Conveyor Belt
Cartesian Clarity.—Against the linguistic transcendentalism (pace Ankersmit) that has beclouded much philosophical thought, the generation prior to those who pioneered the linguistic turn gave us the early Wittgenstein saying, “What can be said at all can be said clearly,” and Husserl saying, “…we can make our speech conform in a pure measure to what is ‘seen’ in its full clarity.” This Cartesian commitment to clarity and distinctness is now unfashionable, but it remains a philosophical possibility and, at least for some, a philosophical ideal. The reaction against this ideal also sought clarity; most of all, it wanted to achieve clarity through overcoming metaphysical obfuscation once and for all, even though this reaction was the reaction against an earlier reaction again metaphysical obfuscation. Wittgenstein and Husserl were both the founders of anti-metaphysical philosophies. These philosophies had fared no better in laying the ghost of metaphysics than earlier efforts by Hume and Kant. The conveyor belt of philosophy continually offers up new anti-metaphysical philosophies, which are shown to be inadequate to their ambition each in their turn by the next anti-metaphysical philosophy to come down the conveyor belt. But the condemnation of metaphysics common to philosophers until a new generation shows them their inevitable metaphysical presuppositions is only a via negativa to the overcoming of obfuscation, whereas the ideal of Cartesian clarity is a telos toward which we can strive, and a metric against which we can measure our progress toward that ideal.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Goldstein’s Tentative Metaphysics of the Past
It is the 98th anniversary of the birth of Leon J. Goldstein (06 February 1927 to 24 May 2002), who was born in Brooklyn, New York, on this day in 1927.
Goldstein adopts a position that he calls critical philosophy of history, but it is a conception indebted to Henri-Irénée Marrou, and not to more recent analytical philosophy of history as we might naturally expect. He makes a distinction between the finished product of the historian and the historian’s methodology by which the finished product comes into being—historical knowing—that is the basis of his tentative ontology of historical facts.
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/leon-goldsteins-tentative-metaphysics
Video: https://youtu.be/iSCdZDYimIo
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ciC7XU3nXsSq45dYG0M5E?si=zSa_g6VIRrWaZZHwpk-OCA
Episode: S02EP09
Like two ships of Theseus passing in the night…
The Infinitude of the World.—The infinitude of the past is a special case of the infinitude of the world of which the infinitude of the past is but one dimension. Similarly, the factual infinitude of the past—that the past is constituted by an infinitude of facts, claimed by Quigley, inter alia—is a special case of the factual infinitude of the world. But we can decompose the world into facts in any number of ways, which implies that there is an infinitude of decompositions of the world into facts, since there are no constraints upon the complexity or extent of a fact (nor upon the simplicity or minuteness of a fact), unless we stipulate some limitation. Conventional limitations built into our interpretation of the world (and of the past) can constrain ordinary ambiguity, but they are no help when it comes to ontology. Wittgenstein claimed that the world is the totality of facts, not things, which would allow us to make an explicit case for the factual infinity of the world in the Tractarian framework, but Wittgenstein was no more explicit on the world as being constituted by facts than Quigley was explicit about the infinitude of historical facts. There is an industry of Tractarian commentary and exposition that could occupy several lifetimes, testifying to the ambiguity of the exposition. Wittgenstein does not tell us, for example, in what the totality of things consists, in contradistinction to the totality of facts (which is the world), but we may conclude that this totality, whatever it is, is not the world. Is either totality infinite? Wittgenstein is silent on this point also, though he does say that the feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling (6.45), and in his later writings he was unsparing in his criticism of infinitistic formulations. But we are still left with the world of facts and the non-world of things, like the two ships of Theseus, one reconstructed and the other consisting of the original planks of the ship. And this is more-or-less what the world of facts is—a reconstruction of the world of things.
Friday 31 January 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 326
Emergent Complexity Pluralism
…in which I discuss my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History,” its long road to publication, emergent complexity pluralism, stellar evolution, macromolecules, the imaginative stumbling block to understanding alternative complexity, and our Lovecraftian universe…
Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/emergent-complexity-pluralism
Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/emergent-complexity-pluralism-202f9ff9dd0b
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1ii7uqi/emergent_complexity_pluralism/
This newsletter discusses my paper that appeared recently:
Nielsen, J. N. (2024). Peer Complexity in Big History. Journal of Big History, VIII(1); 83-98.
DOI | https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v8i1.8111
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The Logical Ideal of History
Predicative History.—With the philosophical logic of the interiority and exteriority we begin to penetrate into the metaphysics of the origins of history. The logical structure of the world is paradoxical because it is impredicative. We can construct locally predicative structures, but the overall structure of the world is inescapably impredicative: the individual is defined by a whole of which that individual is a proper part, which means that we attempt to make sense of the world from a position within the world. The universe is large, however, and we can construct predicative structures in the same way that we can construct artificial languages free from paradox. Elaborated, these structures can be effectively inexhaustible for human beings, but we don’t live in the predicative worlds we construct, any more than we speak the artificial languages we formulate. The histories we construct, however, we do live within after a fashion. There are histories at every order of magnitude in time, each telescoped within the more comprehensive history of a higher temporal order of magnitude—each nested history being the interiority of the more comprehensive history within which it is contained. Interiority is a function of scale. Given the relativity of interiority and the possibility of effectively inexhaustible predicative structures (not to be confused with the impredicative world itself), why would history even be problematic? Because we insert ourselves into our histories, and in so doing we make them needlessly impredicative. This metaphysical self-insertion that follows from a petty cri de coeur demanding relevance above all, is a human, all-too-human failing that can be mitigated for all but the final metaphysical history that converges on totality. A predicative history is structurally objective in the sense of eliminating the historian as a part of whole he narrates, and this is the logical ideal of history.
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