The ascent of human scientific progress, even the unraveling of the complete process of human thinking and hence its history, whether categorized as progressive or regressive, based on different point of views, strikes me to exist due to the interaction of human psychology and humankind’s interaction with Nature and the material world.
This certainly is not a radical idea and perhaps even appears to be a tautology if viewed from one perspective. But once the human psychology and its inherent nature is characterized as having an elusive feature at its edifice, the pervasive radical element assumes a different dimension. The individual psychology and in turn the collective human psychology then has to be viewed as a driving force with an elusive entity as its centrality in the grand scheme of my theory.
So what is this elusive entity or abstract element in the psychological mix or in the very matrix of the consciousness or psyche of humans and thus humankind? For one thing, it is an entity that neither science nor reasoning can define, at least so far. In visible terms it is the entity which may be detected obliquely as a force which has moved different histories in different directions, and the common history of mankind in the direction as we know it, though all along with the distinct foot print of that something that is looking for that etwas which it never can find or be satisfied with. This because, its quest to move in any direction or to find something or act in a certain way in conjunction with our material world itself does not have any blue print of what it is looking for. It only knows it wants that indescribable something that can never be objectified. So when we, or on a macro level, humanity moves in a certain direction, it discovers the void of satisfaction and is then forced to move in a different direction to pursue its relentless search. The urge of the mysterious elusive entity in our psyche is then forced to explore other avenues all along not knowing exactly what it wants, even though it certainly wants what may be akin to the Lacanian Das Ding–something which we can’t define or objectify.
Lacan, though, associated Das Ding to be a pleasurable quest but my exploring of humans is based on what I would term as die Ausstrahlung of Geheimnis and not necessarily based on the pleasure principle of the sought after object.
I think It is the urge to find this something, incessantly, but not grasping it, while all along stumbling into something different which defines a process of a very chaotic and unpredictable historical process of mankind.
It most certainly is the driving force which kept the mythical Sisyphus moving on with resolve in pursuing the most boring and repetitious task thrown at him.
While Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus underscores man’s herculean task in finding meaning in an absurd world, his philosophy is more to highlight the absurdity of the world rather than ascribe any motivation to the actions of mankind in the process of making history.
With Hegel his dialectic conception, though to be fair to him may not have a rigid triadic version of movement of history, nevertheless describes history as a consistent forward movement based on rational thinking to be actualized to the supernatural level in the end. Even though it is not as rigid in its framing as historical materialism, Hegel’s dialect while it has mankind and history in its mix does not rely on the mystery of human psychology or Geheimnis.
What transformed into diamat or dialectical materialism was more a face given by Russian and Soviet Union propaganda to the theoretical works of Marx and Engels. Based on Hegelian thought with a twist dialectical materialism was predicated on Marxist dialectics. It gave a direction to how history evolves and it saw its glorified end in an egalitarian and classless society for the masses. While both Marx and Hegel were giants in the field of philosophy and Marx in Economics, too, they seemed to have predicted an order of things in history and the role of society in convenient and predictable terms.
In reality, the movement of history is not as smooth nor simplistic; it is, in fact, very volatile and chaotic. In short as I see It: The essence of human history is a movement brought about by unfulfilled dreams and expectations. It is too chaotic and can not be gleaned through the spectacles Hegel, Camus and Marx provide– though great thinkers all of them.