I <3 Historiography
May. 6th, 2010 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThis is why I love my historiography class: yesterday, about midway through the class, my professor got stuck for an example to illustrate a point he wanted to make. One of my fellow students piped up: "Like Firefly?"
And everyone in the class nodded and sat back, understanding instantly.
***
On a less shallow note, we've been reading Enlightenment philosophers of history recently: Hegel and Condorcet Kant.
I hate Hegel. In the middle of his introduction he plops down a page and a half about why people who disagree with his theory about the Heroes of history are small-minded twits who deserve, like Thersites - the foot soldier in the Iliad who thought the Greek kings were getting hundreds of people killed because of their petty egotism - to be beaten with a cudgel.
His ideas about dialectic are useful and interesting, but still: what an appalling snob. There's nothing more hideous than reading a book or an essay written by someone convinced that anyone who disagrees must be, not merely wrong in this particular, but dangerously stupid and undoubtedly inferior.
Condorcet and Kant, on the other hand, are darlings. Condorcet was an eighteenth-century flower child, who believed that history was headed toward a glorious denouement of harmony and equality for all among all peoples, just as soon as humans have perfected themselves by...well, it's not clear how universal human perfection will be reached, but life will be awesome once it is.
He ended up getting arrested during the Reign of Terror and dying in prison, probably of poison. I wonder if this dented his enthusiastic prognostication of progress at all.
Kant, more down to earth than Condorcet, believed not that individual humans can be perfected, but that - with appropriate attention to the lessons of history - the civil state can come increasingly - asymptotically - close to the perfectly just state. This sort of thing is quite out of fashion, but I'm fond of him anyway.
And everyone in the class nodded and sat back, understanding instantly.
***
On a less shallow note, we've been reading Enlightenment philosophers of history recently: Hegel and Condorcet Kant.
I hate Hegel. In the middle of his introduction he plops down a page and a half about why people who disagree with his theory about the Heroes of history are small-minded twits who deserve, like Thersites - the foot soldier in the Iliad who thought the Greek kings were getting hundreds of people killed because of their petty egotism - to be beaten with a cudgel.
His ideas about dialectic are useful and interesting, but still: what an appalling snob. There's nothing more hideous than reading a book or an essay written by someone convinced that anyone who disagrees must be, not merely wrong in this particular, but dangerously stupid and undoubtedly inferior.
Condorcet and Kant, on the other hand, are darlings. Condorcet was an eighteenth-century flower child, who believed that history was headed toward a glorious denouement of harmony and equality for all among all peoples, just as soon as humans have perfected themselves by...well, it's not clear how universal human perfection will be reached, but life will be awesome once it is.
He ended up getting arrested during the Reign of Terror and dying in prison, probably of poison. I wonder if this dented his enthusiastic prognostication of progress at all.
Kant, more down to earth than Condorcet, believed not that individual humans can be perfected, but that - with appropriate attention to the lessons of history - the civil state can come increasingly - asymptotically - close to the perfectly just state. This sort of thing is quite out of fashion, but I'm fond of him anyway.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 09:03 pm (UTC)And from what you say, I'd like to learn more about Condorcet.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 09:25 pm (UTC)...well, that last is a matter of opinion, but certainly his feet are closer to the ground than Condorcet's. I could imagine a path to Kant's futures, whereas for Condorcet one of the steps seems to be "And then a miracle occurs..."
But Condorcet's a great read. He was way ahead of his time - he was for gender equality, racial equality, public education, and democracy - and in his writing he just seems so buoyant: we've got this great future! The world is beautiful! Hurray!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 10:52 pm (UTC)But did the new order improve human's nature?
Do you think that subjects of Enlightment Epoch Philosophy are more interesting than subjects of German Classic Philosophy or of other Periods
no subject
Date: 2010-05-07 01:52 am (UTC)As for improving human nature... that's a tricky question, isn't it? I think in some ways we behave better than we did in Kant's time; most people will line up behind the fact that slavery is evil. But how would we know if core human nature has gotten better? How would you even measure such improvement?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-07 09:40 am (UTC)They (Hegel, etc.) worked primarily in such global sphere as Ontology, unlike Enlightment philosophers, who devoted their studies to Society and its reforms.
About improvement ... it was mostly rhetorical question. Of course it's hard to measure it, but we can remember what happened in France. Great France Revolution was prepared by ideas of that philosophers and it brought rivers of blood, terrible wars, dictatorship of Napoleon, bloody Napoleonic wars in all Europe. It revealed not poetic sides of human nature...
That events give reason to doubt in correctness of Condorcet's historical concept...
As for slavery. It's elimination can be easily explained by it's economic ineffectiveness, but not humanity reasons...