“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
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Viollet-le-Duc and the Restoration of the Built Environment
A couple of days ago on 27 January 2025 was the 211th anniversary of the birth of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (27 January 1814 – 17 September 1879), who was born on 27 January in 1814.
Viollet-le-Duc was an architect who specialized in restoring medieval monuments at a time when France and Europe generally was passing through the tumultuous change of the industrial revolution and was finding novel ways to live with the historical past. Viollet-le-Duc was a contemporary of others also negotiating this change, such as Baron von Haussmann and John Ruskin, who saw their task in the modern age differently, but who were all responding to different aspects of the same social forces.
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/viollet-le-duc-and-the-restoration
Video: https://youtu.be/yIRyCpDHP1Y
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3OIBdPVMpJ9kADtURQJAP7?si=ekSzdMnhQ0ui2jw3Tp5qVQ
Episode: S02EP08
The Grand Exteriority of History and the Intimate Interiority of Individuals
Conceptual Metonymy.—There is a sense in which it is deeply ironic that the process of history must await the internal, unverifiable states of an organism caught up in the current of history to be the conditio sine qua non of history. That a way of being—a way of being, moreover, of a biological being—must reflect within itself the comings and goings, the getting and spending, the hurry and the bustle of the crowd so as to deliver this crowd into history, is a challenge to a common conception of history. Many are the historians who have insisted that history is the social and the collective; the individual in his individuality is irrelevant to history—it only when he acts as part of the mass that his actions enter into the historical process. This makes of history pure exteriority, but we have seen that Collingwood makes of history pure interiority. Can we reconcile these perspectives, or should we even try? The distinction between exteriority and interiority would seem to divide the world exhaustively, but it should be seen, rather, as embedded layers of the world, one within the other, like a Russian Matryoshka doll. In this way, every exteriority is, in turn, the interiority of a greater and more comprehensive whole. The organism is internal to the universe, and the states of a biological being are internal to the organism: they are nested and self-similar at a given level of magnification. In this way, the apparent exteriority/interiority dialectic gives way to an impredicative hierarchy in which every whole is an individual that is, in turn, part of a greater whole. The state of the individual is a condition of the whole, whether that individual is a world within the universe, an organism on a world, or an internal state within an organism. Whitehead once wrote, in criticism of Husserl and the phenomenological reduction, that we can never really get outside the world. This is the fundamental and inescapable non-constructivity of the human world, which has been, in a kind of conceptual metonymy, transferred to the inescapability of consciousness and of language, which thus have been wrongly made to take the burden of paradoxicality that infects the world entire.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN CIVILIZATION
An Early Modern Science of Civilization
In this first thought experiment of the series, I imagine the possibility of a science of civilization getting its start during the Enlightenment by a gentleman amateur who, inspired by the Grand Tour and the scientific spirit of the age, lays the foundations of an early modern science of civilization. I also consider further variations on the theme of this thought experiment, such as a medieval science of civilization.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Video: https://youtu.be/qC_ixoSpZ7w
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/63Xp0DVOpJQJo0fpaOMFKm?si=_21nMoK8Qni9IINK0P2C5w
Episode: S02EP07
A Just-So Story of Natural Selection
The Origins of History.—Mind has its origins in a shadow falling across a nerve. The nerve is close to the surface of the skin, and it has become sensitive to light. In the light of day, nothing obscures the Precambrian sunlight. That is the all clear, and the animal may forage at will. When a shadow falls across the nerve, however, that is a sign that another presence looms. That presence might be a danger. The animal possessing this newly sensitive nervous system, the result of a fortuitous mutation, must take heed, must choose between the courses of fight or flight, and, in choosing, it has the first thought in the animal kingdom. Perhaps, in another scenario, the nerve is sensitive to vibrations in air or water, or sensitive to a chemical stimulus, or to pressure, or temperature. Regardless, a proto-thought came into being in response to the stimulus. Perhaps this happened many times, by all these mechanisms and more and better besides. The most effective mechanisms granted the animals so endowed marginally longer lives with a marginally greater number of offspring. They were fruitful and multiplied; nature, red in tooth and claw, smiled down upon them. The species that chose flight became swift or they died as swiftly; the species that chose to fight became deadly or they were killed by a deadlier species. Thought, then, is the origin of species, and as species branched out into a riot of adaptive radiation, there was, supervening on this biological process, an equally riotous adaptive radiation of cognition; biodiversity means cognitive diversity. This is the beginning of history, of history demarcated by consciousness, with an inside experienced and understood as a way of being.
Friday 24 January 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 325
The Spacefaring Inflection/Expansion Matrix
…in which I discuss spacefaring breakout, early and late inflection, rapid and slow spacefaring expansion, large-scale structures of history, gold-rush mentality, growth after stagnation or collapse, rock-by-rock through the solar system, making the leap from one planetary system to another, and my thought experiments in civilization…
Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-spacefaring-inflectionexpansion
Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/the-spacefaring-inflection-expansion-matrix-520a2f6088e1
A Collingwoodian Historical Distance Ladder
The Inside of Natural History.—Would it be possible to construct a Collingwoodian historical distance ladder, analogous to the cosmological distance ladder, by which astronomers measure the distance to astronomical bodies by different methods, depending upon how far away they are? With a Collingwoodian historical distance ladder, we would enter into the inside of history, but by different methods depending on how deep in the past a given period of history is. Collingwood held that, “…history consists of actions, and actions have an inside and an outside; on the outside they are mere events, related in space and time but not otherwise; on the inside they are thoughts.” The task of the historian, then, is to reconstruct the thoughts of past actors and thus, in a sense, to re-live history in his own mind. How far back into history can we push this method? I have already speculated that we might be able to imaginatively enter into prehistory by means of the expanding reconstruction of history made possible by archaeology, and possibly also to go yet farther. Might we also reconstruct the minds of pre-human ancestors and their environment, to the extent that we could reconstruct the “inside” of their history, even if this also involves non-linguistic thought? How far could this method be pursued? How different of a mind could a contemporary human being enter into with some rudimentary sympathy and understanding? Could we understand the inside of history from the perspective of the earliest mammals? What about dinosaurs or the fauna of the Permian? As far back as there is some form of consciousness, and therefore a sense of what it is to be like something (as in the formulation of Thomas Nagel), there remains the possibility of reconstructing this perspective, but is consciousness the limiting factor? Is there no way to enter into the inside of history above, below, beneath, behind, before, or beyond consciousness? Does history have no inside apart from consciousness? Must history be demarcated by consciousness? Is this what makes mind inescapable and therefore idealist historiography inevitable?
THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN CIVILIZATION
Introduction to an Imaginative Research Methodology
In this introductory episode to a series within a series (Thought Experiments in Civilization will be a series within the larger series of Today in Philosophy of History) I discuss the role of folk concepts in pretheoretical thought, thought experiments as a method of conceptual clarification, expanding the scope of our conceptual framework, the definitional question, and some of the problems involved in laying the foundations of a new science.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Video: https://youtu.be/Ud_KcLOYQXA
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Tj6Xbn8Qyzn7rLykvoKSs?si=ye2aYxuGTKGfiDBD5wVwFw
Episode: S02EP06
A Prehistoric Collingwoodian Historiography
Prepredicative Oneirism.—Many years ago I had what I regarded as a philosophically significant dream of experience without language, as though I were living in the world of our pre-linguistic ancestors. Within the dream my experience of the world was utterly unmediated by language or the concepts institutionalized in language. I moved through a world of objects, and in my dream I had no words whatsoever to describe these objects, but I knew what they were, and I had definite feelings toward them (feelings of desire and avoidance), and perhaps it could even be said that I had ideas of these ordinary objects, but the world of this particular dream was most definitely a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic world. This dream alone convinced me of the possibility of non-linguistic thought, and even though I experienced this in a dream, the dream experience was sufficient proof of non-linguistic thought for me, since everything that is relevant to the problem can be fully present in a dream, unlike fantastic dream images and events. It was, in effect, a cognitive and linguistic dream, and I would go so far as to say that I experienced non-linguistic concepts in this dream. This suggests the possibility of extending Collingwood’s conception of history into distant prehistory. Could we reconstruct the thoughts of these pre-linguistic historical actors? Could we formulate a fully prehistoric Collingwoodian historiography? To do so would require extensive use of what Collingwood called the a priori historical imagination to fill in ellipses in the historical record, but the work of the auxiliary sciences of history to reconstruct past societies, including non-literate societies, provides us with a record, albeit imperfect, with which we could reconstruct human experience reaching back even before spoken language.
Friday 17 January 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 324
Defection from Industrialized Society
…in which I discuss revolutionary hesitancy, social defection, jobs, farmers, soldiers, alienated labor, backward societies, Edward C. Banfield, amoral familism, and fragile societies…
Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/defection-from-industrialized-society
Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/defection-from-industrialized-society-82b0d9f40595
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1i6tdga/defection_from_industrial_society/
The Human, All-Too-Human Unfolding of Reason
All Too Human History.—The traditional historian is likely to be uncomfortable with the idea of history as the unfolding of reason (or anything with a similarly Hegelian taint), but it is traditional history that is most easily assimilated to this interpretation (in whatever permutation it appears). Traditional history limits itself to the historical period sensu stricto, i.e., the period of time during which written records have been kept, and is cautious about extending the scope of history beyond this carefully constrained scope, only reluctantly accepting the evidence of archaeology and the auxiliary sciences. Collingwood, despite being himself an archaeologist, falls into this category, since his conception of history is that of the reconstruction of the thought of past historical actors, presumably based on written records. This traditionalist conception also has consequences for the future, since it is this conception of history that gives us the simplest and most straight-forward answer to the vexed question of the end of history: the end of history will come when written records are no longer kept, for whatever reason. We can count this as a species of deflationary philosophy of history, since it is predicated upon no idea or spirit animating events, but only the bare event itself, stripped of its place within a larger narrative. But this bare record of human activity, because it is, by definition, always human, all-too-human history, is always about what the human mind imposes history, and what the human will realizes in history. If human beings experience any intellectual development (which we can certainly demonstrate with archaeology), then human history is the history of human intellectual development, and this is another way of saying that history is the unfolding of reason in time. We may not yet have arrived at the fulfillment of reason to acknowledge the development that has occurred, and we need not insist upon the inevitability of this fulfillment: it would be an equally compelling narrative to show the rise to maturity of human reason, followed by its failure and subsequent decline.
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