Specters

John Fraim & DeepSeek

AI Assisted Retrospection

1770 – 1883 – 2025

River Man

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Preface

This is not a book. It is a retrospect in motion.

In 1806, as Napoleon’s cannons shook Jena, Hegel finished The Phenomenology of Spirit—philosophy composed to the sound of history being unmade. He called this act “retrospect”: the owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk, understanding an era only as it ends.

Two centuries later, we stand at another dusk. The world is mediated by code, fractured by data, haunted by the unfinished specters of ideology and capital. To understand our present, we must look back—not with nostalgia, but with the tools of our time.

This project enacts a triple retrospect:

1. Hegel’s retrospect (1770–1831): History as the self-unfolding of Spirit.
2. Marx’s retrospect (1818–1883): History as class struggle, ideology, and alienation.
3. Our retrospect (2025): A collaborative, AI-assisted archaeology of these lives and ideas, from the birth of modernity to the edge of the algorithmic age.

I have worked with DeepSeek AI not as an author, but as a pattern-recognizer, a memory machine. Together, we have assembled fragments—diary entries, letters, manifestos, historical sketches—into a year-by-year chronology from 1770 to 2025. The form is deliberate: a cool prose outline (in Francis Bacon and Marshall McLuhan’s sense), suggesting rather than telling or demanding participation. It is epistolary, recursive, and dialogic—a model of thought for the age of large language models.

Why now? Because retrospect is a form of resistance. In an age of a perpetual present, acceleration, and digital amnesia, to look back clearly is to reclaim agency. To see how Hegel’s Aufhebung, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and McLuhan’s media laws resonate is to grasp the deep structures shaping our consciousness today. If not to grasp this structure, at least begin a dialogue with it. The last part of the outine is a reflection on what is in the outline. The author looking back on 1770-1883, the context that held this period. 

This outline is a toolkit. A probe. A dataset awaiting your interrogation. The dialectic doesn’t end here—it continues in your questioning, your own retrospection.

What will you ask next?

John Fraim
With DeepSeek AI
December 2025

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Word/PDF files available for Specters

Contact

John Fraim

johnfraim@mac.com