Hello, this is my first post here.
So I was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by F. Nietzsche in a Barnes & Noble edition. At the introduction, Higgins and Solomon assert as follows:
"Nietzsche had suggested at the beginning of The Gay Science that tragic ages are those that seek some purpose to human existence and accept the doctrines of some moral teacher about the nature of values, good, and evil. (...) But also according to Nietzsche (...) tragic ages give way to comic ages, in which the meaning or purpose of life is no longer raised as a question, for life is assumed to be valuable just as it is."
During the text, the authors reinforce that the twentieth century was in fact a tragical century. I realize Nietzsche's quote is not necessarily a historical remark, and here he is talking about tragedy in a Greek sense of the word. But I've read somewhere that history tends to repeat itself and this notion of "ages" got me thinking.
Based on what humankind know of history, ages, cycles and so on, is there such thing as an idea that ages might repeat themselves? What can the study of the past tell us about the future without lacking the intellectual and scientific vigour?
I wrote a response to a similar question a while ago. The short answer is no, history does not repeat itself. The assumption that it does repeat itself runs counter to the modern historical method, which seeks to be as empirical and scientific as possible. One can certainly learn a lot about the past as it informs the present, but that is very different than a search for historic, cyclical ages.
That said, I would like to add to my previous answer that the historical method is based on a Western conception of linear time. Not all cultures in the world conceive of time in such a way, and what I wrote in my previous answer is blatantly Eurocentric in this regard. So some examples: The imperial mythistories of the Mexica for example employed a model of time in which time and space could fold back itself. Tenochtitlan, their capital, replicated in miniature the Aztec foundational story of Aztlan and the birth of Huitzilopochtli. The ancient Maya routinely carried out rituals in which rulers and priests enacted patron deities into the present world, where they could act upon the present. They actually became living, breathing, speaking actors from the past, in the present. They also had histories that folded back on themselves in a cyclical manner, in which past calendar rounds mirrored present or future ones. To them, history repeated itself, and could also be fudged (from our perspective) to create historical harmonies in which the past was present, and the present was also past.
In South America, the Inca mummified their dead. Death was not the end of a ruler's power or ability to act in the present, even though from our perspective, the animacy of the person was gone. Mummies were still living, and could still intercede and exert power on living people. Thus the lives of rulers transcended time itself in ways that shatter our notions of linear time. Likewise, shamans of the Mapuche, known as machi, can enter altered states of mind where they can experience past, present, and future temporalities all at once, living simultaneously different lives and as different beings. Multiple plains of time and beings all exist at once in a person, and during their time shifting, the shaman can reorder and reweave these plains in new ways with new memories.
So these very short forays into how other societies conceived (and conceive) of history demonstrate that actually, humankind, as you say in your question, does have knowledge of historical repetition, of cycles, and of ages, and they are perfectly legitimate ways of mixing past, present, and future to learn new things about each age--though the Western historical tradition does not recognize them as possible or real. Their historical conceptions are very foreign to most people, but they do mix the past and the present and the future, allowing for the past and the present to inform each other. The Western scientific historical traditional was created in a particular cultural, empirical, and "objective" context--a grand attempt to be rational. The result of this tradition is to deny that history has any predictive power. Its methods strongly reject the search for cyclical ages. But other conceptions of time, history, and memory exist, and they strongly challenge beliefs of what history is and how the past, present, and future behave.