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.
