Note added, March 10–11, 2021. The bulk of this post concerns race in the theory of history, particularly the theory attributed to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Not having read Herder for myself, I rely on the accounts of
- R. G. Collingwood in § 2, “Herder,” of Part III of The Idea of History (1946),
- Michael Forster in “Johann Gottfried von Herder,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (summer 2019).
Somebody like Herder may introduce race as an hypothesis to explain history, but ultimately the hypothesis fails, by denying us the freedom that is essential to history as such. Nonetheless, Forster defends Herder as having
an impartial concern for all human beings … Herder does also insist on respecting, preserving, and advancing national groupings. However, this is entirely unalarming,
because, for one thing, “The ‘nation’ in question is not racial but linguistic and cultural.”
Change Collingwood’s word “race” to “linguistic and cultural grouping” then. I think his conclusion remains sound: “Once Herder’s theory of race is accepted, there is no escaping the Nazi marriage laws.”
More detail is in the post below. I go on to review the philosophy of history that Collingwood presents in the Introduction of The Idea of History. This book provided me with a title for the post.
I wrote a lot in this post, as I often do. Growing self-conscious for being opinionated about the theory of history, I listed the published evidence of my actually being an historian (an historian of ancient Greek mathematics in particular).
I originally wrote that my research had been inspired by a tweet. The author of that tweet also wrote the nice long comment on this post. However, although the tweet can be found on the Internet Archive, the author later deleted his Twitter account, and so the tweet appears on Twitter today as a gap in the thread above my own tweet in response to the other tweet.
That missing tweet referred to another tweet of the author, but the Internet Archive seems not to have saved it. It did save the present post; so if one were curious, one could see the changes that I have made since initial publication, or rather since September 29, 2020, when the Archive took the first snapshot.
The changes are for style and local clarity. Any large-scale changes would need me to recover the spirit that possessed me when I originally wrote.
I return to this post now, simply because a friend mentioned reading Middlemarch, and I remembered quoting George Eliot’s novel in a blog post, and that post turned out to be this one.
Had somebody mentioned reading Herder, I might have recalled writing about him in a blog post; that would be this post too.
Our environment may influence our feelings, but what we make of those feelings is up to us. Thus we are free; we are not constrained by some fixed “human nature”—or if we are, who is to say what its limits are?
Rembrandt van Rijn (and Workshop?), Dutch, 1606–1669,
The Apostle Paul, c. 1657, oil on canvas,
Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art
Polytropy 