Trivia / Feliks Koneczny

• Science Marches On: Koneczny's sees historical determinism (historiosophy) and all the "theories" concerning race and the alleged superiority of one race over the others as completely wrong (he ridicules them a lot in the Cywilizacja bizantyńska).
  • He himself quotes, in dead earnest, weird concepts like crystals having sex (no, we don't know either).
  • That said, he was a bit of a cultural suprematist in regards to what he called the latin civilization. "A bit" in the sense that if a country with a latin civilization fell under the rule of a military dictatorship (as Poland kind of did in his time), he saw it as moving towards turanian civilization, rather than the latin civilization developing or allowing for an imperfect form of rule on its own, because he defined it in such a way that it couldn't by definition. (In other words, by naming his categories after existing civilizations he implied these civilizations must exemplify traits he assigns to these categories.) This also led him to a bizarre claim that since Nazi Germany had a double standard for Aryans and Jews, it was an example of jewish civilization. (But take note, this is not a statement on Koneczny's usefulness to a worldbuilder. What's arguable in philosophy or science can still inspire.)
  • Not a fallacy. The Troper above seems to define civilisation historically, as a group of people who have been struggling more or less together for some time. Koneczny defines it as a set of rules with an axiological foundation. If you ditch one ruleset for another, it does not follow that you become (numerically) someone else. You're still you, just different. As to whether a ruleset can develop, yes and no. Yes, you can find ways to realise the axiological foundation that are better, which means they understand and realise it fuller. But if you develop rules that realise another foundation, then you're changing civilisations as defined by Koneczny. So, yes, his definition does not allow for civilisation developing into another civilisation, because it sees civilisations are platonic ideals, not as groups of people. It's a completely different definition than proposed above. Koneczny spends quite some pages on the terminology in Cywilizacja łacińska. As for names - they can be misleading. Koneczny named the specific civilisations he wrote about after the largest or best known groups of people who were following them.