A tale of three triangles

What is the shape of history?

In a world replete with inadequate answers I think it a good idea to have better questions. If you refine your questions you might provoke more interesting answers. I like questions that reveal deeper structures of thought, so an answer has to account for a set of assumptions as it is formed.

“What is the shape of history?” is a question like this. To answer it you need to think whether this is a silly question, whether history has a shape, and if so, what gives it this form? In addition you might consider whether we can think of history at all without presuming some shape to all of it.

Can we say anything about our record on earth without suggesting that history itself has characteristics?

Until the age of the self – roughly the beginning of the Enlightenment to now – men believed that history was like the seasons, and that all kingdoms had their summer and their frost. The shape of history to them was a circle, or perhaps a sine wave. Something that described a repeated pattern of risi…