Relation to others· Society and history
Contingency
Axis: The meaning of history — Does human history follow a direction, or is it sheer contingency?
History has neither plan nor destination: it results from human actions with unforeseeable consequences. Belief in laws of history is an illusion, sometimes a dangerous one, used to justify sacrifices in the name of a supposedly necessary future.
Philosophers 5
Schopenhauerexplicit
Against : history is not a science, for science knows the general and history reports only the particular; it has neither law nor meaning and accomplishes no progress of Spirit. It tells, in changing costumes, the endless repetition of the same, according to his motto eadem, sed aliter, the same things, but otherwise.
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 38, 'On History'
Nietzscheexplicit
Genealogy is an anti-teleological method: it tracks the low and contingent beginnings of values and unmasks the belief in moral progress as an optimistic illusion. History bears no inscribed meaning or direction; it is a play of forces and chances reinterpreted after the fact.
On the Genealogy of Morality, II, §12 · Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", §44
Show inferred positions (3)
Camusinferable
In , Camus denounces the ideologies that sacrifice the living to a necessary meaning of History, and sets against them a faithful to the present and to limits. He refuses any historical providence, which places him on the side of contingency, against revolutionary messianism.
The Rebel (1951)
Lucretiusinferable
The history of mankind follows no plan and no providence: it is need, the chance of discoveries and groping imitation that, with no overall direction, led from the savage to the cities. The arts progress by trial and use, but this progress is ambivalent, for it also brings war, gold and the ambitions that disturb repose. Lacking any assigned meaning or aimed-at term, history therefore belongs to , without lapsing for all that into a programmed decline.
On the Nature of Things, V, 1105-1160 (kings, property, ambition) and 1448-1457 (the slow progress of the arts)
Machiavelliinferable
History has neither providence nor progress: regimes turn in a circle of six forms, each corrupting into the next, and no state escapes decay except by periodically returning to its first principles. This recurrence, compounded by the immense role of , rules out any overall direction: the meaning of history is a return, not an arrow.
Discourses on Livy, I.2 · Discourses on Livy, III.1 (return to first principles)