"The idea of history as a space where the salvation of individuals as members of a “nation,” a “race,” or a “faith” manifests is alien to Indian thought."A clearer statement than the above cannot be found. Of course, modern Indian thought seems to be rapidly alienating itself from the roots of Indian culture. Maybe modern Indian scholarship can rescue it.
The quote is from here.
PS:
As is the one below, with emphasis added:
The fact that everything transpires in history and can therefore be arranged temporally is a relatively banal insight. As a taxonomic principle it is no more compelling than those Foucault discovered on reading Borges in The Order of Things. So the distinguishing feature of the contemporary view is neither the insight into the historical nature of all existence (a discovery variously attributed to Vico, Herder, Humboldt, Hegel, and Ranke) nor the relating of events and discoveries to historical time. Rather, what is distinctive about historicism is the significance attached to history—a significance that, as Löwith rightly notes, originates with the Jewish and Christian experience of awaiting the Messiah. The Greek concept of time is cyclical: historical narratives exist but history itself insofar as it is chance and accidental cannot be the subject of an episteme (science). The proper object of knowledge is the eternal laws and customs that uphold the cosmos and ensure its orderly functioning. As Löwith notes, “In this intellectual climate, dominated by the rationality of the natural cosmos, there was no room for the universal significance of a unique, incomparable historical event.” Contrast this with the Jewish and Christian experience, for which “history was primarily a history of salvation and, as such, the proper concern of prophets, preachers, and philosophers.” There is now a tremendous interest in studying history. As the sphere where man’s salvation plays itself out, history acquires a new significance. To the extent that they regard themselves as Geschichtswissenschaften (historical sciences), the contemporary humanities also stand in this tradition. They have replaced philosophical understanding and ethical self-cultivation with reading the historical tea-leaves.
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Guest · 402 weeks ago
The word itself has been traced to PIE *wid-tor, meaning "to know, to see." An English cognate is "vision." A Sanskrit cognate is "veda."
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
Ask yourself : Which past events? Which ones are relevant? Which ones are not? How does one go from literary records to "what really happened"? Why does one go through this effort anyway to compile a history? Your dictionary can't answer these questions.
Try this, it is dense, but you may get a sense of what the debate is about: https://www.academia.edu/30584186/Theses_on_Indol...
Here's an easy piece of text:
The Nay Science stated at the outset that it was not intended as a “history of the establishment and growth of scholarship on ancient India in Germany” nor did it pursue a “disciplinary history in the sense that it recounts details of departments or scholars” (NS 2). In what sense, then, is The Nay Science a history? As we explained next, “the history dealt with in this book is discipline-reflexive, by which we mean it studies the self-presentation or self-understanding of the discipline’s practitioners: how did they view their discipline? In what way did they see themselves as contributing to the task of translating or clarifying Indian literature to European audiences? What were the means, the arguments, or the strategies used to justify their role as official purveyors of Indian culture to these audiences, and what role did the rhetoric of science and scientificity play in these arguments?”
--- There are three types of history described above. Which PIE words correspond to these? Do tell!
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
Repeating a key sentence here: "historical narratives exist but history itself insofar as it is chance and accidental cannot be the subject of an episteme (science). The proper object of knowledge is the eternal laws and customs that uphold the cosmos and ensure its orderly functioning."
Guest · 402 weeks ago
Guest · 402 weeks ago
The authors are speaking of the Greek attitude toward history, but it was the Greeks, especially Thucydides who made history scientific. I like their analysis of the Christian and Jewish approach to history, but the modern science of history is very much in the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides.
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
The "science of history" is really a bunch of facts tied together with ad hoc explanations.
Guest · 402 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
2. I guess you don't understand the difference between a scientific explanation and an ad hoc explanation.
3. Since you talk of statistical mechanics and history, let me understand what you mean. Statistical mechanics gives us fluctuation dissipation theorems. So tell me, on what time scale does history wipe out the element of chance? e.g., should the impact of Reagan having survived an assassination attempt have died out by now? Should the impact of Lincoln not having survived his assassination attempt have died out by now? Or is the time scale for fluctuation dissipation theorems in history longer than recorded history?
Guest · 402 weeks ago
You and Balu may believe that different cultures have some different essence that can't be dissolved by these global forces, but I doubt that it is significant as you imagine. Of course languages continue to draw a bright line between peoples, but once machines can do perfect translations of anything, will that even continue t9o be important?
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
Yeah, we know *all* about hunter-gather societies. Harari told us, no doubt.
Sacrifices predated civilizations. Look it up.
If you want to know the scale on which history would be able to be a science, read Isaac Asimov (yes, it is science fiction). Why statistical mechanics works despite chance is because fluctuations from equilibrium are wiped out on a time scale that is short compared to the time scale of the phenomena we are studying. When that time scale is longer, e.g., like with the life of organisms, statistical mechanics becomes much less valuable.
Engaging with you would possibly be worthwhile if you at least had a sense of knowing what you do not know.
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
"On the day I visit, a bespectacled Belgian man sits at one end of a long table in front of a pile of bones. Joris Peters, an archaeozoologist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, specializes in the analysis of animal remains. Since 1998, he has examined more than 100,000 bone fragments from Gobekli Tepe. Peters has often found cut marks and splintered edges on them—signs that the animals from which they came were butchered and cooked. The bones, stored in dozens of plastic crates stacked in a storeroom at the house, are the best clue to how people who created Gobekli Tepe lived. Peters has identified tens of thousands of gazelle bones, which make up more than 60 percent of the total, plus those of other wild game such as boar, sheep and red deer. He's also found bones of a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. "The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site," Peters says. "It's been the same every year since." The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.
But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.
To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies."
Guest · 401 weeks ago
Guest · 401 weeks ago
dwc · 394 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 402 weeks ago
This following is a very imperfect analogy for what Balu is interested in. You live in a Euclidean space; but unlike with Euclid, you aren't aware of the axioms underlying the theory of your geometry; and no one is worried about Euclid's fifth postulate. The Euclidean world is natural and inevitable.
Some of us live in a non-Euclidean space; but we're almost all imbued with describing our space with Euclidean geometry. When the Euclidean and non-Euclidean cultures met, it was not on an equal basis, and so the Euclidean description of our non-Euclidean world took hold. The most acute among us notice anomalies in our space; but like you, we too are unable to articulate the axioms underlying our geometry. All that someone like Balu can assert is - there is more than one kind of geometry, the proof is in the anomalies. What Balu wishes for is a science that takes off our collective Euclidean blinders and comes to explain both types of geometries.
Of course, the problem is compounded because we're not talking mathematics, we're talking about cultural differences, which is a fuzzy concept. What Balu is after is a better description of cultural differences; a real science of cultural differences.
What Balu's detractors say is - (a) the anomalies don't exist, they are delusions; and (b) Balu and his type are reactionary. There have not been any more coherent responses than the above two.
Not seeing the anomalies is akin to being stuck in an optical illusion. Then by chance one snaps out of it and perceives the illusion; and once one has done that, one can't return the the former state of affairs.
Guest · 401 weeks ago
Guest · 402 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 401 weeks ago
dwc · 394 weeks ago