Thinking about the END OF HISTORY.

Brav/e Slav/e Vladimir.

  The boy with the weak brain,
      and here he goes again:

       "Brsgwdsvkrkpmxwic"
      which is slavish, slavic.

          He has no idea,
           he is Vladimir.

      He has a tributary toy,
      his so called Cezarboy.

              (Refrain)

      Brav/e Slav/e Vladimir,
          he has no idea,
   but he has a creeping toy,
     his tributary Cezarboy.

A.

At least he had known his publicity for many years. Nevertheless: actually he was shy. Besides: Who doesn’t like the limelight, especially after a time of acclimatisation?

You may have said that in your thread, but you definitely do not say it in your OP, which is what I replied to.

That’s not what I meant, though it does have some connection to it. As I wrote in early 2012,

I think the fundamental problem of our era, which was also Nietzsche’s era, is the conquest of nature. The conquest of nature was “commanded and legislated” (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 211) by Machiavelli, Bacon, and Descartes (among others) for the sake of philosophy, which was gravely threatened by Christianity back then. The scientific revolution instigated by those philosophers was what “killed” the Christian god, for which “killing” we should be most grateful. However, just as the religious revolution instigated by Socrates and Plato et al. was first beneficial but later became detrimental to philosophy, the revolution instigated by Machiavelli et al. has now itself led to a grave threat to philosophy. For “genuine philosophers” (again BGE 211) like the ones mentioned above belong to the formidable exceptions among men, and those exceptions are now in threat of becoming obsolete to the rule, the many, because of the technological advancements that in the West have made life easy for the many, who now no longer need such formidableness (which is indispensable in real crises).

The dire situation of many animals is just one of the consequences of what Heidegger called nature’s reduction to a Bestand, a standing reserve, a resource. The real problem is paradoxically not that animal rights are not being respected, but the conceited notion of the existence of any rights at all! There’s no such thing as natural rights; men are not naturally entitled to accommodate the rest of nature to their needs. But neither are they naturally forbidden to. Therefore, there’s only one way to counteract the continuing exploitation of nature; and that consists precisely in the ideal of the eternal recurrence, in the wish that everything, including all the woes that befall animals—and of course men, too, are animals—, recur eternally… For by wishing for the eternal recurrence of all things, one manifests oneself as the counterideal to the ideal of the man who wallows in “wretched contentment” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 3)—as an Übermensch as opposed to a Last Man. And only this ideal, “the ideal of the most high-spirited, most alive, and most world-affirming man” (BGE 56), can raise people out of their comfy animal-hide armchairs—if only by offending them!

Yes, that’s who he is, or was–thank you for that link, I didn’t even know he was dead (though I’m not surprised; he must have been ancient!).

Well, Nietzsche willed the eternal recurrence the same century Hegel published his Phenomenology. That publication may well mark the end of the beginning of the end of history, but it certainly does not mark the point at which history had completely ended. It still has not completely ended. Yes, it would have been optimal to prevent it from even starting to end, but then again, less than optimal conditions, to say the least, are precisely the optimal conditions of the philosopher!

[size=95]“[A]ll the world bewails today the evil situation of the philosopher in earlier times, hemmed in between the stake, bad conscience, and the arrogant wisdom of the Church Fathers: the truth, however, is that precisely this was a much more favorable condition for the education of a powerful, comprehensive, cunning and audaciously daring spirituality than the conditions of life at present. Today, another kind of spirit, namely the spirit of the demagogue, the spirit of the actor, perhaps also the scholarly beaver- and ant-like spirit, finds conditions favorable. But things are so much the worse even for superior artists: for are they not, almost all of them, perishing from lack of inner discipline? They are no longer tyrannized over from without by a church’s tables of absolute values or those of a court; thus they also no longer learn to develop their ‘inner tyrants,’ their will. And what is true of artists is true in a higher and more fateful sense of philosophers. For where are there free spirits today? Show me a free spirit today!–” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 464.)[/size]

The Christian idea of a heavenly afterlife was indeed preferable to that of a “Heaven on Earth”, i.e., the end of history. And as for eros and thymos: most people are erotic rather than thymotic; but the rather thymotic do indeed tend to dominate history, so they have to be overruled by the rather logic, the philosophers. The Machiavellian mechanism, as found in Bacon’s New Atlantis, was this: to promote a social system in which scientists and inventors–a species of the thymotic–are praised and rewarded for improving the lives of the masses. By this mechanism, modern philosophers overruled another species of the thymotic, the religious zealots of the time of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Contra-Reformation. By Nietzsche’s time, however, it had led to the threat of the end of history.

Yes, I didn’t say it; therefore I said: “Your 3. point is included in the, included in my OP.Included. Not directly said, but indirectly. Anyway, it is quite important to say it directly. So thank you for writing it!

Okay, I merely refered to Contra-Nietzsche’s argument in order to get perhaps a counter-argumnent from you. It’s not important anymore.

I agree.

That’s what I’ve meant, yes. So we have to focus on both thymos and eros as the two focuses (foci) of the ellipse of life, as I sometimes say.

On the end of his-story:

Arminius, please keep your comments relevant to the discussion at hand and not the personal character of other posters. Otherwise, warnings will follow. This holds for all posters in this thread.

Arminius, please keep your comments relevant to the discussion at hand and not the personal character of other posters. Otherwise, warnings will follow. This holds for all posters in this thread.

Arminius, please keep your comments relevant to the discussion at hand and not the personal character of other posters. Otherwise, warnings will follow. This holds for all posters in this thread.

Arminius, please keep your comments relevant to the discussion at hand and not the personal character of other posters. Otherwise, warnings will follow. This holds for all posters in this thread.

O_H, try not to be redundant. :sunglasses:

History can always be created and/or rewritten. So the question is whether the incentive to do that will ever become insignificant. Androids will probably reach that stage. Humans probably won’t.

If history can be rewritten wouldn’t that fictionalize history and create a long novel out of it. I always thought that the historical process consists of rinsing fiction out of history in order to create a more accurate tableau of our dubious activities. There’s a lot of 20th century history still in arrears for that kind of purification.

The End of History occurs when history is no-longer written but imagined.

Seems that way so far. Have you ever watched “Reality TV”? Were you aware that the entire thing was totally fictional? How would you know? How would you know how much history has been massaged and/or invented? Many professors (especially the French) proclaim that all of it is fictional and always will be.

Of course, that is what you are supposed to think.
What? Did you expect them to say, “Okay, we have invented a new history for the Middle East now. You can download it at ..

Why do you expect people to let you know when they are deceiving you?

Why do you think they keep saying, “Reality is only in your mind”?

Ten generations from now, there might not have ever been a WW1, much less WW2. Who will be there to argue?

It has been proposed that someone very prominent is soon to finally announce to the world that space aliens have finally arrived, along with obvious proof of it. How would you know whether they are lying or not? If the media promotes it, it won’t be long before the majority accepts it, whether they ever really believed it or not. Another generation, and it will be incontrovertible fact - “historical events created” - and no one the wiser.

Yes, I know. No one lies on TV without you finding out about it. How else would you know who to believe?

Haven’t you read the “Cezarian comments” which caused that what only you mean, Only Humean?
Haven’t you noticed the “previous history” of that what only you mean, Only Humean?

Why don’t you throw out that stalker, that troublemaker, that most arrogant troll of this forum?
Why is he allowed to insult anybody and everybody? And why are other posters not allowed to criticise that bad personal character?

Does a philosophy forum with the name “I Love Philosophy” really want nothing else than bad “philosophy”?

With the utmost probability, yes, but humans had had their very, very long time without any history, so it is also possible that in the future humans will again have no history, and therefor the androids will help them very much.

What all this seems to imply based on what you write is there can be no End of History because it never even started. We could instead interpret it as if it were some long soap opera encompassing thousands of volumes. This would seem to make history suspect of being more of a Virtual Reality story but I’m not willing to go that far. The stories have to come from somewhere but I will concede that if we could time travel to events which history now records much would have to be rewritten with a corresponding shock of historical proportions to our system.

The “end of history” is not a very much fixed term.

The „historical existentials“ are merely points of reference in order to find out, whether history has ended or not.

“The superman’s Dionysian will to overpower would save the past from drowning in democracy’s shallow waters by willing the eternal return of past inequalities. The superman’s willing of this eternal return is possible only if his will can emancipate itself from hatred of its past, a hatred responsible for modern egalitarian demands to be liberated from that past. […] Modern thinkers culminating in Nietzsche made men aware that human creativity or technology was not limited by anything. Nietzsche feared that contemporary egalitarians would employ this unlimited power to create a world of universal peace and equality. He yearned for a superman whose will to overpower nihilism and egalitarianism would use modernity’s immense power to create the eternal return of the past’s inequality and wars. Then there would be no wars to end all wars.” (Harry Neumann, Liberalism, pp. 164-66.)
Nietzsche’s doctrine includes 3 large teaching pieces:

(1) Übermensch (“Overman”, “Superman”);
(2) Ewige Wiederkehr (“Eternal Return”);
(3) Wille zur Macht (“Will to power”).


I give you three examples of the Übermensch:

size=114 Napoleon (1769-1821);
(2) Hitler (1889-1945);
(3) … (2009-2069).[/size]
If we take this examples seriously for a moment, then we notice that the first Übermensch failed, that the second Übermensch failed, and that the third Übermensch is 5 years old. So we ask: Who and where is the third Übermensch? This reminds us of the time when Jesus was born and Herodes killed all the little children in his country in order to prevent a coming competitor, a coming rival.

Is there anybody who believes in that?

Don’t worry Humean, the first and foremost condition for women to become equal with men is that the men become nervous.