/lit/ - Literature

>>21275653
I don't care about scholastics and I'm not a mystic. My interest is philosophy of history and art. I wasn't anti-academia when I first took the course. It was a while before I arrived at the same view as op.

All history is aesthetics. Politics, economics, mathematics, religion - it's all aesthetics, a preference of style. No one system is better than the other. There is no progression or evolution, only in the sense that preference for a new style might arise out of the boredom of a previous one. The fluidity of the Baroque might be seen as a reaction to the formalism of the Renaissance, but it in no way must be thought of as a progression or improvement on the Renaissance.

This view is remarkably freeing. I no longer automatically hold contempt for a particular political system or method of culture, because in the end it's all preference on a macrohistorical scale. It is the height of hubris to believe in an end of history, as if history is a teleology aimed at perfecting itself. The prospect is so derivatively Faustian as to be banal. In reality there is no perfection, no real working out or exploration of ideas, no progression from a primitive state of mind to one that is more refined. These views are themselves style, a particular aesthetic of interpreting history unique to modern civilization.