Does History Have a Meaning? | Featuring Nick Nielsen

Añadido: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Today I am here with Nick Nielsen Geopolycratus who has a wonderful channel that everyone should go and peruse. He's got a wealth of offerings there including the the newsletter and the series Today in the history of philosophy. I've I've learned a great deal especially about figures that are underdised in both philosophy and history. I love your channel because of the eclectic variety of thinkers that you cover. Before we begin our own conversation about philosophy of history and probably also the uh history of philosophy, Nick, could you introduce yourself to the audience? Uh people who might not be familiar with you, what your background is and how you became interested in philosophy.

[00:00:40]>> Uh thank you for the invitation to your show. Uh hello, my name is Nick. I've been blogging since 2008. Then it I started writing uh philosophy of history posts on a Quora space and that started to get uh a certain following I guess you could say. And after doing after writing posts about philosophy of history there for several years I started then uh at the very end of 2023 in the beginning of 2024 I started the the videos on today and philosophy of history. So I've been doing those. I don't have a video every day, but I try to do something as regularly as I can. I started out with enorm an enormous backlog because I'd been writing these posts for three years or so. So, I had an a word file that's 900 pages long with the all my written posts. So, then when I started doing the the videos, which I also record as audio, so I make them available on Spotify. So, I and I've been writing a newsletter. When I stopped blogging regularly, then I started writing a newsletter once a week. And then just recently in the end of last year, I started doing the video and audio recordings of my newsletter.

[00:01:54]So, so the the the the videos started out focused on philosophy of history and the newsletters are more widely ranging.

[00:02:02]They'll touch on anything that that interests me. The philosophy of history gave me a real agenda and a focus. So, I started focusing on the birthdays of historians and philosophers, which, you know, if you go back in time, they're not really well recorded, but then I'd pick out a few historical events like, you know, Captain uh Cook discovering the Hawaiian Islands and and Caesar crossing the Rubicon, things like that.

[00:02:29]So whenever I have a date that I can tie to a calendar date, then I have an a pretext on which I can hang my own views about philosophy of history, which is a a running theme that that goes through throughout all that material. The the my my my familiar talking points that the people who have listened a few episodes will probably start to get a picture of.

[00:02:52]What was the text you read or or what was a first brush with philosophy of history that really got you interested in it?

[00:02:59]>> I'm not sure about the first brush with it, but I was I was always interested in history and I became interested in philosophy as a teenager, but I spent most of my adult life reading works in philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics. But I always had history in the back of my mind. Oh, I well yeah I can I can say I just remembered um Darren Staloff did a series of lectures for what was then called the teaching company. I think they call themselves the great courses now. He did a series of lectures on philosophy of history.

[00:03:32]The great courses has discontinued that but I still have it on cassette tape and is also available on YouTube for free and that was um influential on me because that was my first sustained engagement with philosophy of history.

[00:03:45]And then I wrote a blog post after listening to that and I wrote if I lectured on philosophy of history and I laid out you know the figures that he Darren Staloff addressed in his lectures and I said you could write another history of the philosophy of history avoiding all of these major figures and just focusing on all all these other figures because there's so many people that said something of of relevance. And so in in my in my episodes, I've continued that branching out into other figures that might not immediately seem relevant to philosophy. So not only do have I discussed historians and philosophers of history, I've also discussed archaeologists like V. Gordon Child architects, but anybody I can find has done something interesting or something that's in my view changed the direction of history through their interventions, whatever that intervention may be, whether it be, like I say, archaeology or or architecture or city planning or what have you, there's usually something that shines a light on our timebound lives as it were. Who would you say out of all those interventions into history, what's maybe the most in your opinion underd discussed or or underrated? Like if you could get everyone on this podcast to read someone that they probably haven't read, right?

[00:05:03]>> Okay. Who would you suggest?

[00:05:05]>> St. Augustine's City of God.

[00:05:07]>> Um there are there are philosophers who have written papers that deny that St. Augustine had a philosophy of history because this is the phrase philosophy of history wasn't coined until Voltater used it in the 18th century as a title of one of his books. So many people trace the origins of philosophy of history to Voltater and then obviously it develops rapidly after that. But you've got this long prehistory where people wrote about history but they didn't call it philosophy of history.

[00:05:37]And like I said, there are some scholars who deny that Augustine had a philosophy of history. But and of course Augustine is a incredibly influential figure in Western history. So there hundreds probably thousands of books about Augustine out there. But they tend to focus on his uh his theology, which is of course where he's been most influential. But the the city of God has been a really important book to me because not only is it about history but also it actually takes a perspective on philosophy of history that that really appeals to me. He goes because as Christian Augustine wanted to show that there was a beginning to history and he wanted and all of previous philosophy had held that the world was had always been there in some form of another and then history went through cycles. This is common. You know Plato writes about historical cycles. Palibius writes about historical cycles. This is this is really >> you have like an Axamander and Heracitis have a sort of cyclical view as well.

[00:06:40]Yeah.

[00:06:41]>> Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. And and the the view was, you know, the the world ended in a big deluge and there was a blank slate and then society could start again. And I I recently said in one of my episodes, we can contrast this to Iben Kaldun, who was the Islamic philosopher of history in the 14th century, I think, who in his cyclical history, instead of being the world being reset by deluge, the people from failed cities are turned back out into a primordial desert and they're there to start over again. uh but it's a cyclical it's a cyclical motif but it's taken up in a in a different social and even a different climatic context. So I was beginning to say that this was um you know Augustine needs to address this issue and in fact the whole industry of philosophy in late antiquity where we've got philosophers who are increasingly influenced by Christianity you know John Philipponus and Simplicius and people like that they're taking up these ancient arguments of the in infinity or eternity of the world and then trying to show that the world in fact is finite and history doesn't repeat. So this is this is something that the Augustine digs into not only in his um city of god but also I think it's the 11th book of his confessions is the f his famous treatment of the philosophy of time and elsewhere also in the confessions he delves into some historical issues. So there's a lot Augustine despite his um apparent you know ideologically driven disinterest in the city of man in favor of the city of god he's still very alive to the issues of temporality and historicity and his treatment of history in the city of god once again it it takes up a lot of technical issues that end up in my view being a very big picture approach to taking history and in what we would today call deep time because he's interested in in in the the big theological picture, how the how the universe was laid down by God, as it were.

[00:08:45]>> Okay, that's that's very interesting. I do I do love Augustine's confessions. I I like a lot of what he has to say on memory or I find it fascinating. He's I feel like I'm uh with Augustine experiencing a a very foreign uh perspective to my own, but that's that's a lot of why I like reading these old books. So, that's interesting. So because I've heard you speak quite a bit about um or I've read your articles and and I've heard you speak about uh both Hegel and Schopenhau who are sort of the you know you could it's oversimplifying a little bit but you could sort of use them as arctiple representatives of this idea of whether or not there's a progression or development within history or whether it's just sort of a recurring meaningless process. I mean with Hegel obviously you have him saying the history of the world is the development of this idea of freedom. uh it's this process of the realization of spirit whereas Schopenhau has this passage where he says everyone who postulates constructions about the world in motion or as they call it history haven't grasped the fundamental truth that what really is is the same at all times which could be seen as you know people will relate this to optimism and pessimism or a progressive view versus you know Schopenhau is more focused on aeticism and and these sorts of things but but there's a sort of a deeper question there right as to whether or not there is a develop or whether it's just sort of uh I love that that ToyinB quote that history is just one damn thing after another. Where do you stand on that issue of whether or not there's a development or a progress within history? I can kind of guess because of what you said about Augustine, but I'm I'm wondering just how you would disentangle all that.

[00:10:20]>> I I I agree that Hegel is certainly the archetypal philosopher of history.

[00:10:25]Schopenhauer is a nice counter to that because both because he personally disliked Hegel and because he he did say that that that that you know there's nothing basically what Ecclesiastes says that there is no new thing under the sun. What has been has been and what will be will be. So >> in my episode on Schopenhau for today and philosophy of history I talked about his view that everything you know need to know about history is already in Herodotus.

[00:10:53]uh Herodotus is, you know, has all these anything you can find in Herodotus was going to explain anything you're going to find anywhere in history anywhere. So it's he he doesn't say outright history repeats itself, but he basically says all the elements are there and you're not going to find anything new. And yeah, Hegel has this big picture of the development of human freedom through various societies and civilizations.

[00:11:19]sense. One of my talking points that I come back to time and again is that a philosophy of history needs to be founded in a philosophy of time because history is is a function of time. I'm interested in setting human history in the context of natural history and that means that it's it's a non-traditional approach because traditionally the most narrow conception of history was that history begins with written records. So when the the the the people in the Mesopotamia started imprinting a wedge-shaped stylus onto clay tablets and created kuneaoa form then history starts and you know and and the practice of writing spreads and that only takes us back about 5,000 years. If you context now that narrow I should say that narrow conception of history has been breaking down for at least a hundred years because of primarily because of archaeology but also what are called the auxiliary sciences of history. There are two dozen specializations with all kinds of weird labels like camponology which is a study of bells and sigilography which is a study of seals and all these what are seem to be highly specialized things that people spend their entire careers trying to lay out the basic principles of. They have greatly expanded history and most especially archaeology has expanded history. So all these societies that were completely lost to history like for example the the Indis Valley civilization >> Indis Valley civilization in the a Asian subcontinent had been completely lost to history. There were no written records about it. It remains controversial whether they had a written language or not because there are artifacts that have been found that have symbols on them that may have been a language but nobody has been able to decipher it as a language. But it was lost to historical memory. And then uh an an English colonial, I think it was Sir Mortimer Wheeler, if memory serves, um started digging around and he found these what turned out to be amazing huge cities.

[00:13:32]Now it happened that the people the indis valley civilizations didn't build anything as monumental as the pyramids which have stuck out of the ground for you know 2,400 years or I should say 4,500 years closer closer to 5,000 years. So we resurrected this entire history. And now it's become commonplace for archaeologists together with historians to reconstruct the entire histories of people who never wrote their own history or didn't have a history or had a history but they they didn't have the technology of writing.

[00:14:03]So it's been lost to us as with the Indis Valley civilization which is the Indis Valley civilization is now called you know the first urbanization of the Indian subcontinent with the later Vic civilization being the second urbanization because the whole the whole area was covered in cities and then those all collapsed failed population scattered and then eventually thousands of years later it was built up with cities again I don't think you can write that off to me it's all part of history ultimately when you set this larger history revealed to us through scientific methods and auxiliary sciences of history. You can't no you can no longer really take this view of Hegel that you can you can take it as as a nested periodization within the larger periodization of human history and then the larger periodization of human history takes us nested place within the larger context of natural history.

[00:15:03]And this is some one of the things I've been writing about recently both in both in my newsletters and in in today in philosophy of history episodes is the possibility of a history of intelligence in the universe. If we were to establish contact with another intelligence presumably naturally evolved on some other world then we would they would have a history and then then there would be a history of them and a history of us. But then there would be a larger construction which is the history of intelligence in the universe which you know could be very brief, could be very long, could go way back into the past, could go way forward into the future. So that's what I what I see as the future of history and philosophy of history is seeing these very large uh structures that extend into natural history and a scientific understanding of the universe. And and one of the one of my another of my talking points that I always mention is that I'm taking a naturalistic approach. So Hegel isn't a naturalistic approach. Calling what is naturalistic approach. Schopenhau isn't a naturalistic approach. But I use their insights and try to reframe them in naturalistic terms. So we can put it in the context of the scientific account of the universe as we know it today. So is there progress? Well, there's got to be change because, you know, planets form, biospheres evolve, and eventually they will die, and eventually things will go on and move on. The larger the scales you reach for, the the blurrier our knowledge gets. So, we're going to have a much clearer understanding of human history, even an extended an extended sense of human history that goes back into human ancestors and goes on to successor species of humanity. and we might be able to say something about progress there. I think it's I think it's pretty clear that even with the >> that's somewhat of a Nichian idea in a way the successor species to humankind the the uber mench.

[00:17:04]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a great passage in Nietze where he says that man is a is a rope stretched over an abbus between man between animal and superman.

[00:17:14]Mhm.

[00:17:14]>> So and and there was an ancient philosopher who used the term hyperanthropos which is very just another way of saying uber munch.

[00:17:23]So right yeah the the idea and and also is called you know transhumanism today things like that you know the whole idea of a technological singularity of human beings merging with machines and uh going on and and doing their own thing in their own way. So yeah that that is a nichian theme. He wasn't limiting himself to to human beings, but saw forward to the possibility of an overman.

[00:17:46]>> So, when we expand our viewpoint out from this like 5,000year period that traditional history has focused itself on and allow the entire breadth and scope of the natural sciences to inform our view of history. It seems like what you're saying is that sort of debates between like Hegel and Schopenhauer kind of become almost uh not as meaningful to us that our knowledge becomes much blurriier and that really these are questions of perhaps grander problems of that like the entire natural history of man as an organism and then embedded in a philosophy of time.

[00:18:21]>> That's that's a pretty good way of way of putting it. I think we can still draw insights from all obviously if I didn't think we can draw insights I wouldn't have spent so much time right >> reading Hegel and Schopenhauer and trying to formulate them in an ex in what I consider to be a naturalistically acceptable framework and like I said the it's still very relevant for what's right in front of our faces and our in our daily I we we always talk about how everything has changed and nothing is going to be the same again but in fact today is a lot like yesterday and tomorrow will be a lot like today and we all know the old saying that the more things change the more things stay the same which was of course Schopenhau's point which you pointed out earlier. So these things remain very relevant to our lives very relevant to our ancestors and our descendants and will remain so for quite some time. My point is that it simply has to be put in a in a larger context.

[00:19:16]And within the smaller context, we can we can talk about all of these things that philosophers have traditionally talked about. But we can also expand our perspective and talk about things that haven't always been at the center of philosophy of history. But like I said earlier, this is one of the reasons I find Augustine so interesting because he operates at these very big scales of talking about the beginning and the end of time.

[00:19:41]>> Yeah, it was interesting. I was watching your episode on Botheus and you were you were sort of making a point about how you know certain texts became lost or just weren't widely weren't as widely accessible or they didn't have as as big of a reach. So for example, Duncotus versus Botheus. You know, it made me think of uh you know, for example, the decades leading up to the fall of Constantinople where all of these texts are coming in from ancient Greece to Italy. Probably one of the driving factors of the Renaissance is this rediscovery of old knowledge that reframes it. I was just thinking of this when we when you were talking about sort of the I guess the blind spots of our familiar historical lens or what have you >> of all that's left out in a very strange way. The future can is constantly changing the meaning of the past as we acquire more insight into those blind spots and then it completely reframes or provokes a complete reinterpretation of what we thought we knew about the past.

[00:20:42]I agree and this has become what I was talking about in that episode on Potheus and the historioggraphy of philosophy has become really important to me because I hadn't realized how relatively recent a lot of our tradition is. One of the examples I used is how Anglo-American philosophy at the present time the most influential philosophy is Hume. And we all know that Hume wasn't successful as a philosopher in his lifetime but as a historian.

[00:21:09]>> Historian. Yeah. That's Yeah.

[00:21:11]Interesting. Then I started digging into it and there wasn't a vernacular language version of Plato's Republic until an English language translation in the 18th century that was published in Glasgow. So that before that as you said that with the with the books and the scholars flowing out of Bzantium as the city fell to the Turks then many of them went to Italy and they brought their Greek editions of Plato with them and then people like Marcelius Facino trans Marcelius Pacino learned Greek specifically to be able to translate the whole of Plato and Plotinus into Latin.

[00:21:52]So we had Latin in in Western Europe. We we had Latin additions of Plato and Plutinus and a number of other figures who we hadn't had all all throughout the Middle Ages. You know, the entirety of the Middle Ages, you say 500 to,500 AD. You know, the whole period is dominated by Aristotle and the reception of Aristotle because Botheus translated a few texts primarily Aristotle and commented on them in Latin. So in the western Europe there was just this small smattering of a few books that were the basis of the entire medieval philosophical tradition where whereas in Bzantium they had all these Greek texts and they spoke Greek so they knew how to read them but they sat on them and they did nothing with it. where in the west they they they took these scraps and they they built an enormous edifice of philosophy and they had such an appetite for it then it drew in the full text of Aristotle which was then tra translated in the the 13th century actually in the 12th century a lot of the translations took place and then as you pointed out later in the the Renaissance then Plato becomes an increasingly important force but Plato was an increasingly important force as a Latin text and people didn't start reading Plato and the vernacular until the 18th century. So, you know, it's hard for me to imagine a philosopher going through their career without knowing the allegory of the cave, which is I produced an episode on the allegory of the cave. It's kind of a weird one which I compare it to subsurface ocean worlds, but it to me this is a really important philosophical thought experiment and and also it's about the calling of philosophy to to to emerge from the cave out into the the light and and to see the forms as they truly are and not through the the veil of appearance. M >> but that's something that's that's only been around um you know about as long as the United States has been around which isn't very long when you start looking at historical time scales. Yeah, that's interesting to think about because there's that that famous quote from Whitehead that all philosophies have been a footnote to Plato and yet that would leave out, you know, a thousand years or so where uh >> there were no footnotes to play. Yeah, there were no footnotes to Plato in the Middle Ages, >> right? Which is really that's uh that's really fascinating. It's funny to go back to to the Renaissance for a moment.

[00:24:19]you remarked, you know, how people are always saying that thing things are always changing today or like we just have this sort of readymade language of speaking about the modern era modernity and recently it became of interest to me partially because I I've been thinking a lot about postmodernism and you know I I kind of had a realization that I didn't really know okay when was the first time we started to talk about modernity and the modern age and that led me of course to the Renaissance humanist writers and the funny thing about it is that there's all these ideas about or or not ideas there there are there's a series of events that are associated with the beginning of the modern age right the printing press fall of Constantinople Columbus the reformation but then I was looking into the usage of the term modern and of course I find you know petrarch talking about antiqua and nova it's this really specifically Italian way of looking at the world at the time right because as you mentioned with Augustine it's history is sort of this progression to the end of the world that's not cyclical. But this is where we get the idea of the dark ages because of course it's the darkness between the last time. I mean Petrick's using it to refer to a a a lack of texts, right? But he also there was a value judgment there that essentially things were good for us the last time there was an Italian that Italy was the center of the Roman Empire. It wasn't this Germanic Holy Roman Empire, right?

[00:25:42]And there's this a lot of patriotism in these histories of Florence that they're writing where we get this the first kind of stirrings of a notion of like there's we're in a modern age now and we had something in the middle between these middle ages between us and you know the dark time that were started when Rome fell right and maybe there was some kind of sort of identification they were making as well between the form of government their form of life right with these Italian communes that rise up to the Greek citystates and the Roman Republic and there's all sorts of various different opinions Obviously, Machaveli sees it very differently. He wants to see an Italian, a new Italian empire rise up. Push the French out of Italy.

[00:26:19]>> Right. Right. Right. Right. He's tired of getting getting shoved around every time there's a geopolitical struggle.

[00:26:25]The observation that I made was that for one, it's very striking that we're coming up with this idea of modern times really as a recapturing of the ancient, right? in that context in the Italian Renaissance, it's a new era because we're sort of like rediscovering the ancient, which is very differently from how people use that term now. But it also just struck me that like what would you make of the claim that most of our periodizations of history and our ways of doing historioggraphy seem to reflect some need in the present moment?

[00:26:55]>> I completely agree. Uh there there's a sense in which all history is a mapping of the present onto the past and people are writing about the past because they want to illuminate or inspire or inform the present for their own you know how we got where we're at and where we're going which is you know the the eternal questions uh as in the Gan painting. One of the themes that I've been talking about recently is how one of the persistent features of western civilization has been its recurrence to the model of classical antiquity but it always takes place under different circumstances and at at later times in history. So the most famous example of this of course is the Italian Renaissance which is a primarily literary uncovering of the texts of you know people like Cicero and Senica and Roman moralists and uh the idea of of the Roman Republic and the nobility of all that. But of course the the Middle Ages were also recurring to that model of classical antiquity but they did it did it in a different way. So just when the the Holy Roman Empire when was refounded when const not Constantine um Charlemagne was crowned in Rome on Christmas day in AD 800.

[00:28:20]>> Mhm.

[00:28:21]>> recreating supposedly the Roman Empire.

[00:28:24]And they used some of the symbols too.

[00:28:26]You know they they they dug around and they found you know you can find a lot of medieval art that repurposes ancient art. So like a a cameo of Octavian or Augustus will be inserted in the front of a medieval crown and that's both an assertion of you know I'm the next Caesar and you know I have this continuous relationship to the past and then if you look at the great Romanesque architecture particularly in France you've got you know these beautiful churches with perfectly classical pillisters and but it it it's so they're taking ancient elements, but they're completely repurposing them. And often, you know, we look at it and we say, well, they're really missing the point. They had nothing to do with Roman civilization, but they they made their own use of it, just like we make our own use of the of the past and we recur to it. And you know, for example, the whole the emphasis in scholarship for the past couple of hundred years of getting the most pristine text it can in the past and making a critical edition and comparing all of the surviving texts and getting the the true work out there, which is not the work that, you know, influenced our the bulk of our history because that wasn't known. It's only in the past few decades that we have these really great critical editions of of classic work. So we're re we are recurring to antiquity also in our own way and drawing our own lessons from it as indeed every generation rewrites history for itself for its own purposes because we need to be able to once again address those timeless questions of who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What does all what does it all mean? I think my favorite period in which there was a return to antiquity or a a re a reimagin like returning to the helenic world again and reimagining it is probably the German romantics and the era of like Gerta and Shelling and Holder I think and and in England too you know the the Shellies and and Lord Byron and I don't know I think I wonder how much of of our perception of the Greek world is actually just mediated through that period in a way, you know, like the the fan the Fantasia view of ancient Greece, we we might call it. I think >> there's nothing more modern though than a reaction. So we get the initial reaction of modernity against the dark ages and then we get the reaction against the reaction and then we get the reaction of the the the reformation and then the reaction against that is the enlightenment and the reaction against that is the is the uh the romantic period which as you say was primarily dominated by German scholarship.

[00:31:19]Uh, so there there's always going to be another reaction and you know the the the attempt to christen a post-modern period is is the most modern thing ever because it's just saying we're reacting against modernity itself.

[00:31:31]>> True. Yeah. Yeah. And now now we're coming up with all sorts of labels like uh metaodern is the new one. Um Yes.

[00:31:37]>> I I don't I think most people don't even know what they're saying when they use most of these words. But yeah, uh because you know, of course, what are the defining features of postmodernism?

[00:31:46]If you listen to like a popular intellectual, they'll list things like they they think that all truth is relative or that they're skeptical of even the most basic truth claims. And it's I'm like, well, you can find those in the preodern world. you can go read piro or you know the sophus you want to talk about like relativity of views like and so uh yeah it's just funny to me that again as you said in referencing Ecclesiastes is there's there's nothing new under the sun >> and that's one of the fundamental positions of the way people view history is that there there's nothing nothing really new is happening we're just going along with the flow it was the same for people in the past it'll be the same for people in the future and then of course that attitude is compared to the idea of you know this is we've got the latest and greatest that's ever happened and it's going to be even greater tomorrow.

[00:32:33]So, >> it's funny too going to the like the quarrel between the ancients and moderns in France and what they mean by modern at that time as the most enlightened civilization ever would be considered totally like retrogressive today. You know, they're talking about Catholic piety and a newfound sense of like the power of the throne and yes, a scientific enlightenment and arudition and all these things, but it's associated with a whole suite of ideas that no one would recognize as modern now. But it's just funny that yeah, even there this is the the greatest time that's ever to be alive. You know, >> there's a passage from Boswell. I can't remember if it's from the life of Johnson or from his journal of the when he went on a tour of the hees with Johnson, but he they talk about the the convenience of their carriage and all the wonderful things that civilization is and talking about how crazy Rouso is for rejecting civilization. And it's it's it's the same thing. You know, we're we're so advanced now. Look at us.

[00:33:32]You know, we we've got it really comfortable. And most people would, you know, view a an an 18th century carriage ride across the he something pretty pretty um roughing it as it were.

[00:33:46]>> Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Well, this brings us, you know, what comes to mind at this point for me is Nietze because of course he had the essay on the use and abuse of history for life and uh I know you've talked about that in the past. I it's been a while since I've listened to what you had to say about it. So maybe we could talk about some of those ideas a little bit or just the general idea I guess to start off with here because we we've kind of been talking about with this idea of history being interpreted through the needs of the present moment that implicit within that is that history is always used for something. Uh of course Nisha in that essay has you know this this uh this notion that there are these kind of three uses for history that he gives of monumental, antiquarian and critical. What kind of uses do you see being most prevalent today for history? Do they fit into Nichch's schema or or do you see uh indeed uh abuses for history going on today um that fall under those uh that kind of schema that he has there?

[00:34:43]>> I see both. Uh, and I think if you if if most prevalent here means uh, you know, what's what's going what's what's what's getting the most clicks on social media, it's definitely political and it's it's usually critical. Not always. So, we've got, you know, one one way to uh, shore up your credentials is to, you know, criticize everything that came before you and say, you know, how how how horrible the world was.

[00:35:10]you know, in the even in the recent past and we we we we've at least now glimpsed the promised land if we could just push it a little more then >> really really quickly the in thus book zerustra where the last man says formerly all the world was mad.

[00:35:26]>> Yeah. But you still see, you know, all of these three tendencies that Nietze wrote about, the monumental, the antiquarian, and the and the critical.

[00:35:35]They're all players, you could say, at the moment with maybe the antiquarian is is is not very I guess the antiquarian has been transformed into scholarship.

[00:35:46]So, we've got a whole industry of people who who spend their entire careers being antiquaries. They wouldn't be the antiquaries that like Nietze paints them in the use and abuse of history. But essentially that's that's what they're doing. And the critical historians are the people who are condemned everything that came before the present moment. And the monumental historians are the ones looking to the great deeds of past men to give themselves the courage they need to do the things that they want to do.

[00:36:13]It reminds me of a um I was watching a video about Machaveli's house and and they talked to a curator who works there and she talked about all of the politicians like Tony Blair who had come there to visit, you know, essentially paying their respects to the man who created uh modern political thought, >> right? Politics as a science.

[00:36:39]>> Yeah. politics as a science but also politics as an assertion of veru. So >> yeah, true.

[00:36:46]>> And the possibility of transforming society through measures that you don't disclose to the ordinary people because you have to appear pious and just and like you're keeping your promises to most people, but uh behind the scenes you're you're you're ruthless and to put a word on it, Machavelian. and in order to get things done because sometimes you have to break eggs to make omelets as they say. So we can find this tradition still there of people paying their respects. And here Machaveli then becomes one of the great figures that people refer to to gird their loins as it were for their next enterprise. And Nietze is very much the same thing because Nietze has never been despite the fact that Nietze has been overwhelmingly influential in academic philosophy over the past hundred years and especially over the past say 50 years. He's never fully been domesticated and all kinds of people read Nichzche and find in it all kinds of different things all kind and and a lot of radical things. uh just like a lot of people are radicalized by reading Markx, a lot of people are radicalized by by reading Nietze and they feel that the scales have fallen from their eyes and they finally see the world as it is for the first time and that and Machaveli has that influence on people too. So these these are the figures now who are our monumental figures that people are reaching back to Machaveli and and Nichze because they show us that we can put aside and this is I'm interrupting myself but you can see that this is a a classic metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality. We're pushing aside the mere appearance of society that we maintain for purposes of polyests and just being trying to appear as though we're going about and being a respectable member of society. But we're throwing all that aside for for the real way that things get done. So we're in this way that that that Nichzche and Machaveli become our metaphysical tutors to help us see the world as it really is. Just like the story of the allegory of the cave is to ascend from the cave and to see the world as it really is.

[00:39:08]Now what what Plato saw when he came out of the cave was very different was from what Nietz saw when he came out of the cave. But they're engaged in the same project. Yeah, I think Nietze would have said the same that uh Plato was a a legislator of values and with values that in his views through Christianity, Plleonism for the people uh influences you know thousands of years of civilization even though you know Nietze would make a very funny argument given some of the things we talked about that even in absentia of Plato's actual texts the other worldism of Plato survives in Christianity and in some form but the point being uh in this context that, you know, for for all the for all the jabs he throws at Plato, you can tell that he he respects the the power of what he was able to do of um affecting a revaluation of values in the form of the way he presents Socrates.

[00:40:02]And I think NZ wants to do something similar. Yeah, >> I completely agree. And not only did he do something similar, he also adopted like Plato a literary style for the exposition of his ideas. So Plato wrote dialogues and and Nita wrote semi-popular works like Zuspect Verustra.

[00:40:21]So they're they're they're communicating their philosophical truth to a to a wide audience in a way that is, you know, they're not writing technical treatises like Aristotle, >> right? It sort of bypasses uh that I think that I love the way you put that that Nichze hasn't been domesticated because his work can sort of bypass a lot of the sort of need for arudition or or a theoretical approach to philosophy and sort of speak to people's sentiments or their their intuitions. I think that's why people have that idea. It's so funny the idea of like someone saying the scales fell from my eyes when I read Nar Makavelli because that's you know kind of religious language and it it is interesting the way you you put that that they are our monumental thinkers. I would kind of agree but what does that say when you know uh I remember the line from I think Shakespeare that uh a damned Machavevelian holds candle to the devil for a while and of course all the things that have been said about Nichzche. I mean, what does it say about our our our age if those are our monumental thinkers that are sort of affecting that revaluation of values for people? I mean, that you know, Augustine would say evil men are now our monumental figures. Surely we're in the end times.

[00:41:36]>> Surely we are. Yeah. So, that that's a very good point. Um, what does it say about us that Nichze and Machaveli are our monumental figures? And I don't have an immediate answer for that, but it's certainly well worth thinking about. And Nietze had such a feeling for unexpected interpretations. One of the things that I really liked is his when he when he's dissing Luther and saying, you know, how Luther was didn't get the fact that the church had become a power in the world and it it had installed itself as this as this great institution that that controlled lives and controlled the course of history. Luther wanted to tear all that down and nas saying can't you see this was the will to power that has that has been achieved through the church and you know people don't want to see that and but that's why it's so valuable to read nas when you see that you say yeah that that was that was the expression of the will to power and you see the same thing in in in medieval knighthood you have Bernard I think it was Bernard of Clarvo who wrote uh a tract about you the the ideal knight and his you know his devotion and his pity and all of these things. But you know, as a class, these people were trained for war and and very often violent and they expressed the will to power and they their their their form of recreation was play fighting like jousts and and that you know even in the midst of a Christian civilization that had banned chariot racing and gladatorial combats, gladatorial combats just made a return in in the form of jousting.

[00:43:24]So the and this is one of the senses in which the more things change the more things remain the same and which schopenhowers vindicated because you know so the ancient world had gladatorial combats but then they got banned and then the medieval world eventually developed their own gladatorial combats in the form of joust and then people no longer did joust but then gentlemen started dueling and then dueling was made illegal. So now we have you know things like internet blood sports and MMA and you know you know melee kind of fighting where it's just anything goes. So these these are the perennial social institutions that are going to come up whatever kind of society you have >> right >> both because people want to do them and they can that's an alternative way to to to assert your own personal will to power but it's also incredibly popular for the uh people love watching this stuff.

[00:44:22]>> What do you think in light of that?

[00:44:23]Because yeah Nietz says some very interesting things about the Renaissance and Reformation. uh you know in the antichrist he dreams about what if uh Chisari Boura had become pope that could have saved European civilization.

[00:44:35]Um but yeah it's like he says I believe the way he puts it in one passage is that essentially the the spirit of paganism sat on the throne of the church.

[00:44:46]>> Yeah.

[00:44:46]>> And then Luther and his monks who were not he said they were by no means tired of medieval ways of life ruined the whole harvest of the the Renaissance.

[00:44:54]And that in a way there's this sort of narrative in nature that this this this Protestant way of looking at things is in a way of a maybe a recapitulation to the socratic is a way of looking at it.

[00:45:06]This obsession with logical coherence of doctrine, right? Like we can't have these contradictions. We can't have the church being the moral authority while they're also, you know, occasionally the popes are raising armies and sacking cities and fathering illegitimate children and selling indulgences. like we can't tolerate this contradiction. I guess I would ask I mean sort of the way we've been talking about this, do you think that that Nichzche's view of things actually holds or was there just as much of a will to power within Lutheranism? Because I could kind of see both arguments. Like I see what Nichch is saying, but I tend to think that a lot of the time there's sort of a a moral gloss that we put on things that isn't necessarily it's just like a way of reinterpreting what we were going to do anyway. I don't know what >> yeah rationalization in the classic Freudian sense you we're going to do what we're going to do and then later we produce the rationalization that says why why it's all justified but it definitely the reformation was a will to power on the part of the German nobility who were sick and tired of being under the yoke of the church and that took you know that took an alternate form in next door in in France you know we were talking earlier about how Machaveli wanted to throw the the French out of Italy In that late medieval, early modern period, France had become the 800 pound gorilla of Europe. It had the biggest outstanding army. It had the most people. So even though they weren't considered, you know, the equals in in culture of the Italians, they they had the military power to just basically march across Italy and no one could stand against them. So the French got back at the Italianbased church that way. The Germans cut the cord as it were and they and the the early reformation scholars focused on the conversion of the nobility and we call this the magisterial reformation and they ruthlessly put down initially when they still could they put down uh movements like the Anabaptists who were who were not the elites of society who wanted to separate themselves off and create a kind of ideal communism in Müster, >> right?

[00:47:19]>> But but but clearly these societies of the north of the Alps that had become the Holy Roman Empire of the German peoples, they didn't want to be subservient to Italy anymore than the French did. And the French had their own monarch of a unified country so they could do their own thing. And the Germans did their own thing by by separating off.

[00:47:41]Then the settlement of the whole reformation with the end of the 30 years war is a treaty of Westfailia which enshrines in it the you know esio quas religio I think that's how it goes. I'm not sure I'm I'm sure I'm butchering Latin sorry for that but whose country it is his religion is going to hold in that country. So you then you get national churches all throughout northern Europe >> and kind of like the beginning of the idea of national sovereignty in a way.

[00:48:11]>> Yeah. Yeah. That was my next thing was going to say is the national churches are then followed by nationalism itself as an ideology and then out of that then there you get um you know you get a kind of feedback where this idea of nationalism then moves down into Italy and you get the Italian you know resorimento and and the and the unification of the Italian state in the 19th century just like you know Germany unified as a nation state in the 19th century.

[00:48:39]>> Yeah. Yeah, the way Nietze would sort of see it is that uh the the effects of the protest Pro Protestant Reformation are maybe more on the level of values. It's making us more into these sort of uh he would say dogmatic. That's that's our our our mode of thought. Now >> you you compared them Protestants earlier to Socrates and you know Nietze was purposefully insulting towards Socrates who were you know the hypertrophy of the dialectic or something like that is what he attributes to and yeah you see that in the Protestant reformers too as as um Kenneth Clark said in his civilization series they these these men of the north believed that there was such a thing as truth and they wanted to get at it and and it's it's the same socratic impulse.

[00:49:22]So, sorry for interrupting.

[00:49:23]>> Yeah. Oh, no, that's that's fine. Well, because I wanted to comment on on on what you said that it indirectly leads to the birth of nationalism in a way, which is it it's so funny because it's uh Nichze is so often a critic. It it may be even a contradiction in his work possibly that he's so often a critic of really the power of the dialectic or of the idea, right? that, you know, all of these interpretations are sort of a conscious gloss on reality. They're post hawk. But it would seem it would seem to then be odd to to kind of go after the Protestants with the the tack that he takes when really it's sort of the maybe the more interesting thing about the Protestant Reformation or indeed most historical flash points are that the ways in which they insensibly change the world, the ways in which they have consequences that aren't even perceptible until hundreds of years later. And I think it's an apocryphal quote, but it's so good that it doesn't matter that it's fake. That when Mao was asked about the whether the French Revolution was a good thing or not, that the the story goes that he said it's too soon to say.

[00:50:30]>> I haven't heard that, but that's great, >> right? I think the reason why it's apocryphal is because it was actually like some other Chinese official not Mao and he might have been referring to some more recent event but it I I think it's true regardless of whether it's apocryphal that it in a way it is too it's always too soon to say because you know the French Revolution I mean my god the the the ripple effects of of how that has profoundly changed the world you can't say was that a good development or not until we know what all of those effects will be and They never end. They're constantly spilling into one another.

[00:51:05]>> We have a paradigm for that for from ancient thought, which is the idea that uh Solon when he visits Cusus in the first few pages of the histories of Heroditus, he says, "Count no man happy until he's dead." You know, because Cus is this, you richest king ever. And he's saying, "Well, look at all these great things I got. Who's who's the greatest who's the greatest happiest man?" and and Solon says, "Tell us of Athens." And this isn't what Criesus wants to hear.

[00:51:35]And then after going through these stories, he he he makes the point explicit. Count no man happy until he's dead. Because you and and this is what Hegel is saying when he says, "The owl of Manurva takes flight only with the setting of the sun." You can only have that kind of understanding. You can only say you can only gather the sheav together after it's all been harvested and that's the end of the season. So the end of the season for a civilization is the end of that civilization. As long as that civilization is ongoing, it's going to have new development. Well, there are exceptions. If a if a civilization ends enters into a prolonged period of stagnation and experiences no development, maybe then you could say, okay, this this is a spent tradition. We can say something about it. But as long as it's still developing as our contemporary world is very much in the grip of the forces released by the French Revolution, yeah, it's it's it's early to too early to say. And also you could say that this quote attributed to Mao. Like I said, I hadn't heard that before, but it's a great quote. Plays into the trope that Fukul discusses in I think it's the beginning of the order of things where he talks about the Chinese civilization being the most deaf to temporal events. So, you know, you would expect you would expect someone from a 3,000-y old civilization to say, "Oh, yeah, this happened 250 years ago. Well, it's who knows? We'll we'll we'll we'll wait and see how that goes."

[00:53:03]>> Right. Right. Right. Yeah. It's like the new the newest thing that just happened basically. Yeah. That that quote from Hegel the the the L of Manurva unfolds its wings at at dusk that sort of we it's always in retrospect that we are able to achieve an understanding. I guess in light of that what do you think of attempts to use history to predict the future. So I'm a big fan of Peter Turin's work. I'd be interested in your thoughts on him. There are there are others as well though who try to sort of construe uh broad patterns. I mean the interesting thing is that Turin actually says this is no longer history once I'm doing this. He came up with the new term the uh cleodnamics. Right. Right. Um because it it's I'm trying to take this and turn it into like a mathematized science. So obviously it's not >> history at that point.

[00:53:52]>> But what are your thoughts on that? Do you think that's do you think it's possible to have some sort of useful framework predictive framework distilled out of history?

[00:54:02]>> I clearly think that there are patterns there. This is one of the ways in which philosophy of history has either been failed by its practitioners or philosophy of history as a discipline has failed the intellectual obligation it has because so much of this conversation takes place on such a superficial level >> like you know if you take the Hegelian schema of you know what's happened you know since the ancient world up through the French Revolution and and you know the ancient world knew that uh one that none are free and that the the next knew that that some are free and the Germans know that all are free. Uh >> and that's the end that's the end of history >> and and that's the that's the end of history. Yeah. Um and and but but people take these extremely simplistic ideas as though there you you have a choice between history developed into three parts or history doesn't develop at all.

[00:55:05]And that's just that's just ludicrous.

[00:55:08]And because there's so many different ways in which things uh develop and there's so many even if we say that you know some people regard it as a horrible unconscionable claim to talk about you know cultural evolutionism and that history passes through stages. Now the classic example of this is not only Hegel but it's also Markx. So you have the the slave mode of production and then whatever comes next and then the industrial mode of production and then that gives way when the expropriators are expropriated then you get the communist utopia and then there's things are different. So but you still you've got this series of stages based on technology and an economic paradigm of how how you're going to produce the goods for your society. And I've actually read I couldn't I can't cite the source, but I've actually read people saying that things like if the if the series of steps or stages that happen aren't deterministic, then it then it doesn't make any sense at all or it's not even worth saying. But, you know, you can have a society pass through a revolution and pass through a republican stage and then have a dictatorship and then have another revolution and then go back to something else. There's so many different ways that you can move the counters around on the board, but people get stuck on these very simplistic ideas like you have in in Hegel and a few other famous philosophers of history. And I'd really like to get beyond that to get to the point where we can talk about maybe a taxonomy of patterns or a taxonomy of kinds of events or a taxonomy of actions that people can take and then we can start talking about the combinations that these can take and how that they can if they become sufficiently complex that they can pass over thresholds and then you get new qualitative qualitatively different properties hold in a society. So for example, we've had inquiry into the nature of the world since the ancient world and then with the scientific revolution then that ramps up with the scientific method and you get all these all this scientific knowledge and the technology that follows from this and it's reached a point where it changes our relation to the planet. It changes our relation to the past and the future and some something new has appeared in history.

[00:57:27]That doesn't mean that everything before is false and everything in the future is going to be great and wonderful. It just means that there's been a change because some threshold has met that hasn't been met before. Just like when civilization itself got started, you had a a transition that went on literally for thousands of years where there were hunter gatherer tribes in one in one region, one geographical region, and people were settling down and creating agriculture and creating villages. And then eventually villages would cluster together and you'd get cities. And then that that fundamentally changed our our way the human way of life and change the direction of history. If if you hold that history is an account of what happens to civilizations then history begins with civilizations and it's the same thing. So I think that we need to get beyond these overly simplistic ideas of both of cultural relativis relativism and cultural um um evolutionism >> and and start seeing things in a more pluralistic way to see the the different combinations that we haven't yet visited. Now, just like we were saying a little bit ago about the the French Revolution not having played out yet, and it hasn't yet because there's all kinds of you can go back and read the detailed histories.

[00:58:47]there are great many of them of the French Revolution. All the things that were going on, all the ideas that were coming out and they're still being acted upon in different ways today and they haven't yet been been exhausted even as new things are appearing like the the the the technological uh the increasing technological sophistication of our communications and transportation networks and things like that.

[00:59:16]So would you say that that somebody like Peter Turchin with trying to would the point be that his his attempt at turning history or drawing a predictive science out of history is inevitably going to end up oversimplifying things because of course he's just looking at say structural demographic trends. Is that going to be too uh too simplistic?

[00:59:37]I think it serves a role and I think it's valuable. I think it's the cleodnamics in particular, I think, is a little weak on its theoretical side because they're they're trying they're making a real effort to have an empirical science and I respect that. I respect what they're doing and I think it's valuable.

[00:59:57]I just one of the problems that's engaged in what I earlier called that we need to to find a greater degree of pluralism in our theoretical understanding of history >> is that people don't want to hang around to have these things explained to them.

[01:00:13]I mean how can you force you how can you force people to sit in their seats to listen to you talk about the 17 different ways that a civilization could originate and the 25 different ways that it can fail. And then when you take those together and you multiply them, you get all the different ways in which they can rise and fall. And then you get a typology that literally extends to hundreds of different types of people stop paying attention at that point.

[01:00:38]They want a simple they want a a lumper tech taxonomy, not a splitter taxonomy.

[01:00:46]And and there's a there's a there's a role for this, of course, because there was a scientific paper that came out a few years ago called nuance because people were getting so into the nuance of things that that they were losing the picture of science as trying to frame general laws. So obviously there's a role for science to frame general laws that ignore nuance. It it's like the Reddit the Reddit stereotype, right?

[01:01:15]Well, well, actually that's a bit of an oversimplification and Yeah. It's like to a certain point it's becomes counterproductive.

[01:01:24]>> Yeah. Yeah. And I I'm I'm guilty of that myself. You know, I I confess to it. But >> me too.

[01:01:29]>> One of the ideas from philosophy of history that has been influential to me and something I've talked about many episodes is Wilhham Viban's distinction between the idographic and the nomtic.

[01:01:41]Nomothetic. Nomos is the Greek word for law. So the nomtic is the lawlike and the idographic is the particularistic.

[01:01:50]And he made a distinction that was then further elaborated by others like Hinrich Rickert that history was an idographic science. It aimed at getting things more particularistic and more fine grained. Whereas the natural sciences like physics which is the paradigm of natural science was frame was we it was about getting at the law like things that could be inunciated in mathematical terms like force times accelerate mass force ma what is it the FM fa force times acceleration equal mass whatever it is I know force uh yeah it's fine >> you can see we're not physicists >> force equals mass times acceleration >> I That's what it is. Yeah.

[01:02:33]>> Sorry for mangling that.

[01:02:34]>> I may may the force be equal to mass times acceleration.

[01:02:39]>> Very good. But he also wrote in another text how um science is like a pendulum that swings between a nomtic pole and an idiographic pole. And I think we see this very clearly in our times.

[01:02:54]Anthropologists in particular, they play this kind of parlor game where somebody will make a generalization about society and say, "No, there's a tribe in New Guinea that does this and therefore your generalization is wrong." Right? I mean but those are obviously those are outliers and but as society itself undergoes certain changes and favors whether where they want to see things simply in terms of a few laws or see things in their particularity in terms of the you know the diversity of of various instantiations of a law you get a change in science. So enlightenment science was very reductionistic.

[01:03:36]Enlighten like the like the the law of motion we were just talking about or uh Newton's uh theory of gravitation and all these things. They're they're they're gleefully reductionist in throwing away everything but what can be covered by the law. And then you know several hundred years later we moved on to a point where where there's a much greater interest in you know in even making the hard sciences so-called into idographic sciences where we note all the little exceptions and we've got this massive particle zoo and all these kind of things going on. And the next swing of the pendulum, you know, if we last is is that we come come back around to a more more nomadic and less idiographic formulation of our understanding of the world. What do you think drives that? Is it a is it a cultural uh to is it to be Hegelian again? Is it a zeitgeist thing?

[01:04:30]Is is because that would be kind of interesting, right? if if if cultural trends might affect the way that we do science and thus what our assessment of the objective reality is. No, I I think I don't I don't think there's any question that cultural trends trends affect the way we do science and the whole one of the things I've written about but not recently is how in the early stages of the enlightenment enlightenment bound itself very closely to science and it was all about science but as as the centuries have elapsed since the high enlightenment there's a lot of scientific findings that don't really go really along really well with enlightenment ideology but We still have um very much an enlightened ideology controlling how scientific budgets are parcled out. This is controls everything in our world now unfortunately who gets funded and who doesn't get funded. And then of course that translates into people >> you know young people saying oh I want to do this and then their advisor says well yeah that's a wonderful thing but you won't make him any money. If you want to make him any money you have to get into this. This is one of the things that Sabina Hosenfelder talks about constantly in science world. All the money was going into string theory and you know she thinks it's a a effectively a barren branch of physics. It's not going to pan out with anything much. You know I don't have the expertise to judge what the future of that's going to be or or whether it has gone whether string tree has gone overboard and been overfunded.

[01:06:02]>> But the general p but the general public doesn't know anything about physics either. So it is interesting that that's kind of what I'm puzzling over. It's like why does string theory suddenly become because I remember that moment right where maybe about gosh maybe 15 years ago or so at this point where all of a sudden string theory was everywhere that affects the funding of science and like the direction of our search for knowledge. But it's that's I I'm not expecting you to have an answer but it's it's just one of those puzzles like okay why is string theory why does that touch the cultural nerve or not the nerve but you know what I mean. But but like you said, since the public doesn't know much about this sort of thing, it's just a certain percentage of their paycheck is taken for taxes and then the then this is given to the government and then the government parcels it back out against the institutions and the institutions parcel it back out again to scientists.

[01:06:55]But even though scientists represent a tiny fraction of the total population, there's more scientists in the world today than there was ever in the past.

[01:07:03]There are literally right tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of scientists working at the present time.

[01:07:10]A lot of them are getting money from institutions because it's a it's a career choice and they follow trends. I mean they can't help it. I'm not I'm not insulting them. I'm not saying you know I'm not expecting people to be you it would be inhuman to think that people would not follow trends and string theory has been a trend. That doesn't mean it's wrong. Some trends are you know there there's nothing right or wrong about high hemlines or low hemlines it's just it's a trend and same thing in physics. Now I think there are cases in philosophy in physics in sociology in anthrop in all of these academic disciplines there's ideas that get traction that you know basically are barren and we would do better to forget about them.

[01:07:58]And I think one way to address that would be 10% of all, you know, government grants going to opposition research. So when somebody gets a huge, you know, $10 million to study something, they have to give a million dollars to the person who hates them. Uh who's going to set up a research program that's going to show that everything that they're doing is I think that would be really valuable.

[01:08:20]>> No, that sounds great. That's a great idea.

[01:08:23]>> How that would apply to philosophy, I'm not sure. I mean, you could, but philosophers don't get many grants, just like mathematicians don't get many grants. They they they they get their careers and they get their paychecks from their institutions, but they're not they don't get the huge instruments built for them like astronomers and physicists or even the the labs that that that uh biologists and people doing that kind of thing get.

[01:08:48]>> Yeah. Personally, I think the solution is to take some of our tax money and establish Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, where the scientists can be totally liberated from public opinion and uh wow us with miraculous new technologies.

[01:09:03]Kind of joking, but you know, maybe this is one of those uh you know, simplistic single factor analyses again, but Haidiger said that technology was sort of like, what do you call it? like the steering rudder of all historical and social change. And it seems to me that that's part of the reason why it's it's probably the main thing that you know, for example, Turin's cleodnamics totally ignores because it can't take account of it, right? Is the changes in technology are impossible to predict. It It's so obvious. It's so like uh like almost fasile to say that but it's just I often tell people to imagine themselves from the perspective of someone say in the 1500s and or like asking someone from that era to predict are the the problems and challenges we would face as a result of our technology today and and and maybe troubleshoot solutions with that person, right? They would just have no frame of reference at all. If we then place ourselves pitch ourselves out 500 years into the future, we would realize that we're we're similarly incredibly ignorant that it's is that one of the main reasons then why a predictive history is always thwarted. On the other hand, I have noticed that just on a sort of uh intuitive level, it seems like many of the artists end up having this kind of precience about the course of technology. Not in a specific irrational argument, right? But I recently saw a clip of David Bowie where he was saying that the internet would completely change the entire structure of society and the interviewer says, "Well, it's just a tool, isn't it?" And Bowie says, "No, it's an alien life form." And that's that's like an an image, right, that he's giving. It's not it's not like a a dissertation, you know, it's sort of an artistic, you know, a spontaneous utterance, right? But in a way it's true because now that they're training these AI models, we found that what they need is data and the internet facilitated that. And now at the time when the internet's first coming into being, it would it would be really hard to discern that that oh this is going to be a huge tool for training language learning models because of all the data they can gather. They hadn't wouldn't even even conceived of that yet. And and yet you have David Bowie saying like with this kind of artistic intuition, no, that's an alien life form. The other interesting thing he said was that with the te because the the interviewer says, "Well, they made big predictions about the telephone too." And and David Bowie says, "Yeah, the president said that one day there would be a telephone in every town in America." You realize there were the absurdity is that it's such an understatement, right? It's like they couldn't even grasp the scope of of where technology was was was headed.

[01:11:47]explicit prediction usually is pretty cringe, but as you say, the the artistic vision of what's possible sometimes does okay. And and we were talking earlier about the tradition and how it gets filtered through what happens after it.

[01:12:01]And what we end up with is tradition. A lot of the stuff that seems cringe gets set aside. And then sometimes we rediscover something that's been set aside. Maybe it was cringe to the previous age, but now it new it speaks to us again now in a new way and it's time to to bring it back again. But some some some things some things last and and some things don't and some things have their hour and some things uh their hour has not yet come. Well said. Uh could you maybe give the audience um if if you're willing to uh let let everyone know what you're working on now? Maybe what's coming up on your show and anything that you want to shout out, anything that uh you want to draw attention to that you've got going on in the future. Since I've been recording Today in Philosophy of History episodes for 2 years now, I've covered a lot of the figures I wanted to cover, but I still haven't gotten I still haven't said everything there there I have to say. So, I s have a list of names. Some people I'm going to return to. Some people I haven't talked about yet. You know, some people I just passed over because I wasn't ready. It was just the birthday of Eugene Minowski who wrote a book about time. I was going to do an episode about that last week, but I didn't have the time to read enough of it to produce a coherent episode about it. So there's still figures that I will return to, but what I hope to do is more schematic content, by which I mean building up my own views and uh giving an exposition of them in a series of talks on on various points. So I've become very interested in the idea of deep time. So I'm planning a series of episodes on deep time, which I've already hinted at in my recent episode on what I titled the beginning and the end of history. and several other related projects. But I want to write more and talk more about the philosophy of deep time and its relation to philosophy of history. I have a lot of projects but I don't know what I'm going to end up spending time on because I I I focus on exclusively what interests me and since that shifts around then I end up changing. So one of the series I've been thinking about for quite some time is uh has the working title the good life and historical perspective. So this is uh on the intersection of ethics and history. So I want to examine how people have conceived the good life in different societies and different periods of history and review you know this ancient conception of what the good life is and how it gets reinterpreted as things change. So that's one of those schopenhawarian points which doesn't really change that everybody wants to live the good life but what it means to live the good life is very different in different eras and I' I'd like to talk about that. So I have an outline for that I've been working on for some time. It's not really close to being finished but something that's always in the back of my head and the work on deep time and many other projects. So, I intend to continue to producing single one-off episodes about particular thinkers and their ideas and hopefully also transition to more um series of talks that can get more into the details of particular doctrines.

[01:15:12]>> Wonderful. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean by the way about being guided by interest and I also have many many projects that I'm working on simultaneously uh which is almost a must for me because I need I I need to have multiple irons in the fire. So, well, Nick, >> variety is the spice of life.

[01:15:31]>> Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Nick, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much for joining me.

[01:15:36]>> Well, thank you so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed this conversation.

[01:15:39]>> Signing off. If you enjoyed the Nichze podcast or found it helpful, you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com/untimelyrelections.

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