Change is the defining feature of history. By history, I mean human history; specifically, the history of the human world, which exists over and above–yet never entirely independent from–the physical and biological world.1 As time unfolds the present is influenced by the past; what is, has been conditioned by what once was; the human world of today is a synthesis of the human world of yesterday. Just as any given moment holds the necessary conditions for what is possible in the future, the necessary conditions of the world we inhabit today existed in the past in some way. Today has developed and emerged from new combinations and novel instantiations of a multiplicity of conditions existing in the past. A given moment may be said to comprise a “whole”, out of which emerges a synthesis constituting a larger, more complex, whole. Thus, there is a directedness to the unfolding of history. Like the expansion of the universe or the arrow of time, it would appear history moves in a single direction.2 This phenomenon–in which the totality of circumstances constituted within the human world influences and affects itself over time–I will call historical conditioning.3
Continue reading “Toward a Theory of History”