Grand Strategy Annex

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:54:32 -0800

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

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:19:42 -0800

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

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 01:51:36 -0800

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

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 01:28:21 -0800

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.

Friday 07 February 2025

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 22:45:36 -0800

The View from Oregon – 327

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

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 16:44:55 -0800

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

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:53:11 -0800

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…

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:16:03 -0800

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

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 14:46:23 -0800

The View from Oregon – 326

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

View of Peer Complexity in Big History

The Logical Ideal of History

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 11:20:24 -0800

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.

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 03:29:31 -0800

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

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 12:21:53 -0800

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

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 01:06:50 -0800

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

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 01:04:19 -0800

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

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:58:06 -0800

The View from Oregon – 325

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

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1idb368/the_spacefaring_inflectionexpansion_matrix/

A Collingwoodian Historical Distance Ladder

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:51:51 -0800

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

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 23:12:53 -0800

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

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 22:51:05 -0800

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…

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:02:34 -0800

The View from Oregon – 324

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

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:08 -0800

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.