Is history cyclical?

[padraig (u.s.)]

Padraig, do you teach?

no. I volunteered as ESL teacher for a bit, and I was a TA for a couple classes, that's it, but never real teaching.

it's just how I write online, I guess, idk. I don't talk like this irl of course, would be insufferable I'm sure.

I think I see discussion here as a collaborative project

 

[shiels]

Haha I mean it genuinely. You make me go and look stuff up. Maybe you can set me assignments!

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I had been thinking making a "rolling history - gossip, lies, slander, etc" thread where I'd include some general recs + YT vids, and post something from time to time when I felt like it, maybe I will. I don't think I'd actually want to be critiquing people, tho.

 

[Benny Bunter]

which is perhaps the history version of all the talk about different ways of looking at time

"history" never actually begins or concludes, but humans and our works do, so we wind up imposing artificial beginnings and endings

i.e. the "Middle Ages" beginning in 1066 (Hastings etc) and ending in 1453 (fall of Constantinople)

obviously historians are more aware than anyone of the artificiality of such constructs, yet, we're stuck with them

things like social history, microhistory - history from below - are in part an effort to counteract Great Man etc focused narratives

I'm not a historian and havent read this thread right through, but this post happens to chime in with something I just read in Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz' Indigenous people's history of the US - about how Native peoples have been written out of existence through artificial "firstings and lastings" - so you get all these signs and monuments commemorating the first settlements (as if people never existed there before then) and then you get stories like Last of the Mohicans and Ishi, the last Indian.

 

[DannyL]

I'd be into a thread like that. I've got more and more interested in history over the last few years, alongside a bafflement as to why I wasn't interested as much in it before.

 

[shiels]

I'd be into a thread like that. I've got more and more interested in history over the last few years, alongside a bafflement as to why I wasn't interested as much in it before.

Me too. i was joking about the assignments but do keep marking our work

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

how Native peoples have been written out of existence through artificial "firstings and lastings"

sure. that's a mix of things over time. retroactive terra nullius justification. victors' propaganda. 19th C. romanticization of the noble savage.

once you've defeated an enemy, you can afford to pay tribute to and romanticize them. in fact, doing so makes your own victory look better.

for another famous example see Dying Gaul. the Romans (again) were well aware of valorizing defeated enemies.

Charles C. Mann write a very good book about pre-Columbian America that I'd recommend, called 1491

 

[version]

I think it comes back to what one means by history and cyclical when one asks "is history cyclical?"

I took the OP to be basically a literal question, as in the history of human events

in that sense, the model of an atemporal bloc isn't helpful - it's impossible to construct history from all past events co-existing simultaneously

if it's a more philosophical question, then I think time, past and memory are better words to use than history

I'd like to hear whatever anyone has to say on it, literally, philosophically or otherwise.

 

[version]

I love this explanation of Finnegans Wake I read recently re: Joyce attempting to write multiple possibitlies and interpretations simultaneously and the interference pattern produced being the story,

One of Joyce's tactical methods of embracing a universe where you can't "pull back the curtain" and know perfect truths and correct interpretations is by splitting the story at points of description into multiple possible stories/interpretations. When a character is described they are simultaneously attractive and repulsive, tall or short. I think what Joyce is doing here is almost like deriving equations. To create a terribly shoddy metaphor here, most writers solve math problems by inputting the specific numbers of the problem and doing out the math. Joyce leaves the variables general and twists the equation around to find the general solution to a whole class of problems.

Where this metaphor falls apart is actually something I like because Joyce doesn't stay general with his variables/descriptions to do this, he provides every specific example of a variable he can fit into the text. When people talk about finnegans wake being inspired by Vico and his cyclical conception of history where stories repeat (and Joseph Campbell's incredibly popular conception of the heros journey repeating over and over again) I think they are talking about this concept. Finnegans Wake is interested in the patterns that the repeating stories of humanity create when plotted altogether in all their permutations.

To leave a specific example of this in Finnegans Wake that is perhaps most prominent, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker did SOMETHING bad in the park, or he didn't, maybe he exposed himself maybe someone exposed themselves to him, maybe he was pissing drunk and didn't realize he was doing it clearly in eyesight of others.... it is never resolved. Instead every one of these interpretations sums together into an interference pattern and THAT pattern is the story.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

"Those who wrestle with the past are doomed by their own"

we're all doomed by our own past, whether we wrestle with it or not

to paraphrase the famous line that Trotsky didn't actually say, "you may not be interested in history, but history is interested in you"

what "doomed" means is a matter of viewpoint, circumstance, inclination

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I'd like to hear whatever anyone has to say on it, literally, philosophically or otherwise

sure. I just want to be clear about keeping history delineated from philosophical investigation or conception of time.

not that there's a literal border, of course, but they're two different questions with two different goals

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

"The past" means history in this instance. As in those who attempt to wrestle with and view history are doomed to failure due to being trapped within their own and all the biases etc which come with being an individual.

yes I had understood all of that, I think we covered it pretty neatly above

I think it - like all mental processes - has a degree of ambiguity that words like "doomed" and "trapped", despite not being wrong, don't convey

you can be intellectually aware of being trapped within your individual context but you can't know exactly the effects of that entrapment

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the above Joyce thing is basically the same as Rashomon (the short story it's based having been published contemporary to Joyce)

clearly there is some connection between the past as conceived in memory and as conceived in history

but history is an argument based on conscious investigation of the concrete reality of the past

the record is always imperfect, motivations can only be guessed at, causes must be inferred but still - a record of events

stories, myths, memory operate in a different conceptual - or perhaps semantic - realm

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the first self-conscious "historian" as we would recognize it is probably Thucydides (it depends on how you view Herotodus)

and he begins The Peloponnesian War by explaining why and how he wrote it

For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that immediately precede the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or other matters

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

tho tbc I think it both perfectly valid and v interesting to investigate the relation between individual consciousness and history, or the past

ever since I understood the concept, I've always found it very interesting that you cannot by definition separate yourself from your context

it's an extremely troubling realization, and what I take a great deal of philosophical investigation to be driven by, certainly existentialism

 

[shiels]

sure. I just want to be clear about keeping history delineated from philosophical investigation or conception of time.

stories, myths, memory operate in a different conceptual - or perhaps semantic - realm

It's the intersection of these concepts that makes the slippery question in thread title an interesting one tho. and there are people are trying to tackle them together. So there's that 'deep history' stuff which is about multi-disciplinary approaches across archaeology along with say neuroscience, linguistics, and 'cognitive history'. Looking at how the feedback between our values, myths, understanding of time shape behaviour, power structures, and then of course major events. There;s the understandable necessity to remove subjectivity from the process of understanding teh past but when we get really really reeally really smart we can count our subjectivities as part of the same evolving substance

 

[shiels]

There are scenarios where our understanding of time or spiritual ideas have an impact on major events… concepts of the afterlife as a means of control, armies slaughtering because they believe they had god’s backing, or not bothering to defend for the same reason. There has to be some faith in the inevitability of proletarian revolution to get people to take action etc. So yeah material conditions and environment dictate a lot but ideas are material too, its all in a feedback loop. Which brings up spinoza again

 

[version]

I'm gonna stick this here to remind myself to read it later,

Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History /Theses on the Philosophy of History

www.sfu.ca

 

[shiels]

I love this explanation of Finnegans Wake I read recently re: Joyce attempting to write multiple possibitlies and interpretations simultaneously and the interference pattern produced being the story,

I think interference pattern is a great way to put this. all culture as this emergent interference pattern

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

'deep history' stuff

regular history is inherently multi-disciplinary. "deep history" is an academic buzzword, a way of claiming academic space.

it's been a long time since history proper was primarily limited to written texts. archaeology has been hugely important for over a century, linguistics and philology for longer than that. as new scientific techniques (radiocarbon dating, advances in genetics, etc) become available, people make use of them when appropriate.

it depends what kind of history you're concerned with. different things will utilize different types of sources.

in terms of scale there's also a point of diminishing returns, tho again it depends on your goals. as we can see here it is easy to slip into "everything is everything" rambling. the same thing can happen with an academic veneer.

"removing subjectivity" from anything, including the process of understanding the past, is impossible

the idea that if we "get really smart" we can account for our subjectivities within our understanding of evolving structures or processes is also a fantasy

in fact, such a belief would be historicism