A Metaphysical Approach to the Philosophy of History: An Introduction to a Universality

Abstract

If history is aligned with metaphysics, it can promote universality, and until this alignment occurs, one culture, or one people, or one age has little chance of being successfully compared with another. Individual histories of isolated periods of time, such as ancient Egypt, or Aztec America, or the age of Louis XIV are important individually, but they confer little meaning when compared with others, that is, if they are comparable at all. It is the task of historians to search for humanity among all humans who lived in bygone ages. Certainly, universality indicates that the world is the result of a process of individuals pulling together and pushing apart, of support for underlying proposals and denials of the same. History signifies a process that is the result of the unknown, and a process is simply a series of steps, actions, or procedures producing a result. Whether the result is desirable is irrelevant to the process itself because the latter manifests an indifference to its outcome.