The contemplation of the philosophy of history sub specie aeternitatis has two major schools of thought:

The Hegel-Marx-Fukuyama school that holds history as essentially “progressive”, as in starting from a primitive origin and gradually progressing toward a final, perfected form.

The Greek-Egyptian-Chinese school that views history as cyclical, never progressing, never changing, constantly reoccurring in a Great Reenactment, with each actor like a spoke in a giant wheel, forever running in circles.

Starting from Hegel’s idea of thesis and antithesis, in which the constant struggle and conflict between the two antagonistic forces eventually merge to create a synthesis, which, after periods of incubation and stability, splits once more into new thesis and antithesis, Marx substantiated upon Hegel’s higher German ideals and philosophized into the concrete, materialist struggles between the bourgeois, the proletariat, and the owners of “the means of the productions”, which, so he predicts, will eventually culminate in the reification of the ancient ideals of Communism, a heaven on earth, the most perfect form of governance.

Francis Fukuyama, the anti-Karl-Marx, so to speak, builds upon the same philosophical framework of Hegel and predicts the eventual triumph of western liberal democracy all over the countries in the world and predicted the end of history—the end of ideological struggle—as we know it.

On the other hand, according to the classical school of thought, widely held among the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, and the Chinese, as expressed in the works of Tacitus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and whoever authored Romance of the Three Kingdoms: 三國演義, history is more of a farce, with lots of sound and fury, not signifying much that is new, and behind the veil of this madness, there is a cosmic principle that is at play, that is unchanging, that is cyclical; a Great Eternal Recurrence lives through all of our histories on a scale.

The view sub specie aeternitatis is unique to men, says Wittgenstein. The view sub specie aeternitatis needs an Einstein then. All philosophies of history so far have lived in an inertial frame of reference. All philosophers of histories have only used Newtonian mechanics. The trajectory of history itself needs to be redefined with Riemannian geometry.