Life is a pendulum swing between 'balance' and 'unbalance', between stretching in different degrees towards one particular brand of extremism, before reaching a point of judgment where one decides that one has had enough of that, and then swinging back again towards the middle, if not past the middle point and out towards the opposite polarity. This pendulum process of life never stops.
This is the Hegelian (or post-Hegelian) 'life-cycle' of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis -- then start the whole process over again, ideally at a higher state of experience and wisdom but that is certainly not guaranteed because man has a high propensity for narcissism, greed, love, sex, jealousy, envy, hate, unilateralism, power, revenge, imperialism, 'tit for tat', destruction, and self-destruction. These factors inevitably undermine the 'ideal' element in the Hegelian evolutionary life cycle, undermine the 'learning from history' factor -- and, indeed, add a very common 'tragic' element to the whole process -- life and death, evolution and regression, continually hanging in the balance of man's individual and/or collective, reason and/or stupidity.
There is no way of predicting whether man will learn -- and/or not learn -- individually and/or collectively -- from his or her earlier acts of transgression and/or narcissistic/righteous stupidity.
This adds an 'existential, free-will' component to any Hegelian thought of 'predictable historical determinism'.
-- dgb, Nov. 9th, 2008.
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