The Logical Ideal of History
Predicative History.—With the philosophical logic of the interiority and exteriority we begin to penetrate into the metaphysics of the origins of history. The logical structure of the world is paradoxical because it is impredicative. We can construct locally predicative structures, but the overall structure of the world is inescapably impredicative: the individual is defined by a whole of which that individual is a proper part, which means that we attempt to make sense of the world from a position within the world. The universe is large, however, and we can construct predicative structures in the same way that we can construct artificial languages free from paradox. Elaborated, these structures can be effectively inexhaustible for human beings, but we don’t live in the predicative worlds we construct, any more than we speak the artificial languages we formulate. The histories we construct, however, we do live within after a fashion. There are histories at every order of magnitude in time, each telescoped within the more comprehensive history of a higher temporal order of magnitude—each nested history being the interiority of the more comprehensive history within which it is contained. Interiority is a function of scale. Given the relativity of interiority and the possibility of effectively inexhaustible predicative structures (not to be confused with the impredicative world itself), why would history even be problematic? Because we insert ourselves into our histories, and in so doing we make them needlessly impredicative. This metaphysical self-insertion that follows from a petty cri de coeur demanding relevance above all, is a human, all-too-human failing that can be mitigated for all but the final metaphysical history that converges on totality. A predicative history is structurally objective in the sense of eliminating the historian as a part of whole he narrates, and this is the logical ideal of history.