Liberating the Future from the Past ? Liberating the Past from the Future? An Essay Presented to Lettre International Berlin and Weimar 1999

In the middle of the eighteenth century the Academy of Dijon placed the following two questions before the best minds of Europe. "Has the Restoration of the Sciences and the Arts tended to purify Morals," and secondly, "What is the Origin of Inequality Among Men; and is it Authorized by Natural Law?" Jean Jacques Rousseau's startling answer to both of these questions challenged the very idea of progress and made an indelible mark on the pride of Europe. Civilization had evolved, Rousseau argued, but mankind had not. The French philosopher's resounding blow to European confidence presaged an era of revolution and of ideology, one which would embody his own contradictory answer to the Academy of Dijon. The world would be conquered by the industrial revolution, social classes come into conflict, and great wars erupt between authority and freedom; and still the dilemma posed by Rousseau would remain on the uneasy conscience of western culture. Only now, two-hundred and thirty years later, at the conclusion of the millennium, do we acknowledge, that for us, the question for us is no longer one of a just social order; but rather whether any process can be discerned in history. We question not history's being, but its order. For Rousseau and his contemporaries the great philosophical question was the nature of the social, not the historical order; but it is not so for us, since we no longer believe in the perfectibility of any society. Even so, we remain unable to move beyond Rousseau's dilemma of nature against society, though we now feel compelled to attempt to understand the process of history itself. To this end we ask ourselves if we are "free" from the past, and equally if the past, as an artifact of the imagination, has today any real independence from the future we envision. Our prescription is clear, for if the future cannot be liberated from the past, nor the past seen clearly in and for itself, then the process of history must be suspended. But is the choice we face really such a stark and simple one? Can we manipulate history and bend it to our liking, reformulate it and start its direction anew? Civilization, after Rousseau, was at best a hedge against corruption, was at worst corruption itself. But few philosophers of the enlightenment questioned how a civilization might move as an entity through time. It is left for us to consider this, and to try to see if we can understand ourselves now any better than could the men of the eighteenth century.

The Remembrance of Things Past IS the Past

Thomas Mann once wrote of the past as that "Very deep well--should we not call it bottomless? Bottomless indeed...". But what is the past to us, as individuals, and as nations? Can our past be strictly divided from that present in which we give it utterance?

It is only in the act of remembrance, and act initiated in and a part of the present, that the past is constructed. The act of imagination toward what is to come is equally an act performed in and limited to a present moment. There is thus no firm ground to which we can link our desire to "liberate" the past from the future, or the future from the past, since all vision emanates from and is conditioned by a present moment. It is in this willed act of remembrance, this active conjuring of the present, that past and future are constellated. For if we would point backward to some thing, some place, or some instant, then we only demonstrate that we have drawn some imaginary boundary between it and the present moment. All time is concurrent until it has been formally divided by the regularity of the cycles we witness in nature. Yet all of these cycles have reference only to one another, and there exists no ultimate frame of reference, unless it be infinity. If all in nature is eternally recurrent then where is history and time? Thus the remembrance of things past IS the past, in so far as that remembrance is an act which sunders and elevates, and in which passed events are "realized" under the aspect of eternity. The past is not a dimension of time to which we have access outside of the imagination, for when we do have access to it is not a past but is rather a present. One moment of the imagined past is thus predicated upon a yet earlier moment of the imagined past; and so recedes all history into that "deep well" of which Thomas Mann wrote.

A past, of which one could be aware as of a flow or sequence in the present is a contradiction in terms; since one cannot arrest, except psychologically and briefly, the flow of time out of the past. It has often been said that those who do not remember the past are "condemed to repeat it." It would be more accurate to say that those who do remember the past are condemed to submit their lives to the power of that past over the present. This is in many ways a conscious choice and one in which asethetic and moral criteria play a part. Those who often "get first to the future" are those most willing to abandon that same power of the past; and those most recluntant to entirely relinquish the past often become those who live the past over again. Yet we cannot simply define the past as what appears to have actually happened, for history must be interpretated, and those who are too certain of what constitutes historical reality only generate new idealogies, which are themselves destructive of the truth they would represent.

But how then, is the past formally divided from the present? At a given moment, when a mythic pattern has been delineated or fulfilled, then the present is superseded, and slips into its existence as an embodied form. This division can often be quite arbitrary, and may have more to do with inner psychology than with quantifiable time. It is a cliche to state that time does not conform to an absolute chronology, but this is evidenced in nature in the varying life-spans of species and by the perception of time within psychologically altered states. It is only with the imposition of a mythic pattern upon cyclic nature that we arrive to clearly distinguish a past from a present. It is then that the imagination creates a summary, a shorthand of what has "passed". Is this transition then from the past to the present an event , such as can be dated? Are epochs dated by the outcome of great battles, the foundations or constitutions of states, or the promulgation of codes of law? It would not appear that any of these historical events are, in and of themselves, satisfactory to divide a past from a present. Only our own death, and the dismemberment of a archetypal order, satisfies the necessary conditions for this transition. Death is that which cannot be further effaced by time and is thus the limit of our human knowledge. The past is made real to us as human beings by the death of those nearest to us; and the door is thus opened through time by the sure knowledge of our own mortality. The lives of nations, the essence of "history", is similarly more tied to the reality of men's individual deaths, than to victories in war, conquests, new constitutions or states, and all such events along a "worldline". Indeed, it may be that the very meaning of wars and revolutions are the individual deaths that take place in them, and not their "historical" significance. For it is only the individual, however unknown or obscure who does possess a meaning. Only he can give order and significance to the essentially random series of events which are designated as "history".

Yet these events, in and of themselves, do not possess an innate depth, or provide any special insight into nature; they merely exist as properties on a wider, more infinite ground. It is upon this ground that our focus should fall, so that an "authentic" history may be recovered from an "inauthentic" history of deeds and dates. Our question must be, "What truly moves, and how does it move?" Does time itself move along a line from past to future, or is the real movement only an illumination which occurs eternally in the present? Are the past and future empty lines which intersect to form consciousness, and on which events are strung like the beads of an abacus, or are they the dimensions of a process which endures eternally?

History as a chain of "events" extending from obscure beginnings toward an obscure end does not seem to save either the actual or the aesthetic circumstances of lived experience. Again and again western culture has been surprised and overtaken by its own naivet? about history. We appear to believe that history has an easily perceptible order; that it repeats itself; that the study of it can illumine the future. But if we are forced to identify even a single event which has repeated itself we cannot do so, since no event has ever reduplicated itself, and even structural affinities between periods or events are swept away by the contrasts which follow upon their comparison. It becomes clear that we are missing something. Perhaps in seeking to understand the process of history, we have lost sight of the only process which we do understand, that of our own finite lives. It is only our lives which can illumine history, not history which will illuminate them. If we can accept this subjective hierarchy of forms, then we may eventually be able to get some insight into the pattern of the whole by which we are enclosed. If in nature ontogeny recapitulates phlogeny, then may not a similar principle hold true for history; that is, may not any one of its moments reflect the entirety of its form? What might we discover if we are willing to assume this truth? Perhaps it would then become clear that it is not great secrets and staggering cycles with which we must cope to understand our place in nature, but rather it is the our very finitude which links us to the macrocosmos. We may not be able to answer all imponderable paradoxes, but our finitude may come to better represent the process it would seek to understand. That finitude in space and time is emblematic of eternity. The remembrance of things past is an act of will which orders and sets limits of duration and perception in the sensate world. The past did not exist at the moment of its making, for at that instant it was an active present. Only the imagination as an act of will constitutes it as an "object" in time. Not only does man make history, but he constructs for himself, as well, the sequence of order in which it is perceived.

What is the past? The past is that which appears to recede but which is the construction of memory through imagination.

The Nature of Modernity: Gnostic AND Promethean

Some historians have suggested that our age, especially our century, is an age of Gnostic revolt. Gnosis, or knowledge, in this sense, is that refusal to acknowledge the clarity of a directly divine order within history. Such a refusal, in this view of gnosis, leads directly to the terrors and tragedies of history, since the revolt against the belief in a sacred history gives rise to those human delusions and ideologies of which our own century provides so many examples. This is a profound question, the answer to which will bear great consequences for the social and moral order. Most importantly, until we understand our own time, then we cannot begin to perform that revisioning of the past necessary to "liberate" it from the future, and the past from it. This act would be a hermeneutical one, and implies the creation of a balance between two extremes: subjection to the past, or subjection to a future. In order to achieve this balance one must understand the nature of the contemporary world, for only when we have an objective view of our own time, do we possess the necessary detachment to revise another time and another place. In attempting to contemplate the past and the future we are inevitably led into a deeper contemplation of the present.

But by what then is the present characterized? What does modernity demonstrate? Prometheus is that foresight which permits the storage of the grain, the harboring of the fire. Prometheus is that Titan who initiates civilization because he is able to take deliberate action to create and sustain culture. The light which the fire-bringer brings is the light of reason against superstition, the knowledge than even men can be like the Gods. But this knowledge comes at a cost: man's freedom will be forever compromised, his duty shall henceforth occupy him for endless days and eons; he too, like Prometheus, will endure endless pain.

It is appropriate that the Promethean myth stands at the beginning of the Greek cycle of experience, and further that it can now be seen again in the outline of modernity. The condemnation which Prometheus suffers is not an elective one, but rather one imposed by necessity, anake, a force with which not even the Gods can contend. What sort of God is it then, who condemns Prometheus for bringing the light of civilization to earth? Is this the creator-god, a source of benevolence, and arbiter of the good? Or is this the Demiurge, that which limits, controls, and confines? It is at this intersection that we discover modern man. In one hand he holds the fire of Prometheus, in the other the flickering candle of Gnostic condemnation and alienation. Here the other meaning of Gnosis as religion becomes clear: man is the prisoner of the God of this world who is not the Lord of Creation.

The poet Yeats wrote in 1933:

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night....
The body calls it death
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

This tension between gnosis and promethean advance, between the moral responsibility which adheres in knowledge and the power of knowledge itself: this is the characteristic tension of our time. Each day this unresolvable dilemma is played out in countless conflicts both within and among the societies of the world. But in order to transcend these antinomies it will be necessary to conceive of the "movement" of history as more than a chain of linear expectations.

Heraciltus, five-hundred years before Christ, wrote of that unending strife of opposites necessary to sustain the world. It is that strife that we witness today, twenty-five hundred years later. Only one thing seems to have changed: and that is the relative variance of evil in the world.

But if it is the tension of opposites as they change into one another does cause nature to cohere, then we can readily understand that this strife too underlies the "movement" of history, a "movement" which is nothing but enantidromia, the exchange of opposites. The force of one religion, state, or historical event calls forth its opposite in the ceaseless strife of Heraciltian transformation. We cannot "see" this process, for "we" make up the being who embodies it within history. To us, therefore, history appears as a succession of loss and gain, of final victory or defeat, or of slow evolution. But on the level of its psychic constitution history is that duration, experienced as tension, in the present moment. We do not need to catalogue here the innumerable forms this tension has taken in our own, and in previous centuries. For it is all too clear that nothing which we might call "good" in history is free from an admixture of evil; just as no "evil" event does not, in the end, wind up producing some "good".

If our age is both Promethean in its disquiet but haunted by the Gnostic spirit, then we might expect our epoch to be both energetic yet curiously "set apart" from the sensate life of the world. The world environmental crisis, now nearly a century in the making, stands as evidence that the conflict between what "belongs" to nature and what to culture is far from concluded. It is here that we witness most dramatically the loss, and the gain of power, resulting from the alienation from our own senses.

Promethus expresses the irremediable guilt and faith of modern man; just as the Gnostic spirit also conveys both culpability and conviction.

The Persistence of Evil

One very clear inheritance from the enlightenment to our own time is the essentially millenarian notion that with the "liberation" from dogma and with a moral revolution, evil and error would be vanquished from the world. We should at all costs be honest-- we do not have a good word to substitute for "evil". This word too often is made to connote that which can be entirely distinguished from "good". But we lack any other word to express the undesirable reality which manifests itself wherever boredom, frustration of needs, and a certain vacuity station themselves in the mass experience of our time. We speak here not of actions, places, or things, but of facts; of that something best summarized by Nietzsche when he wrote, "Man would rather have the void for a purpose than be void of a purpose."

Today we confront this void nearly everywhere in our societies and in the world. We confront it in the increasing divorce of work from the tasks of building a just social order, in the banality of leisure and entertainment, in the emptiness of wealth, status and possession, especially where these form the highest common good we can imagine. We also confront evil both in the lack of a religious faith and in the literalism of an excess of such faith. These fields are the connective tissue which join the life of the spirit to the body, and through the body, to the totality of the human community. In each of these spheres we are forced to admit the poverty or failure of modernity.

If this evil of which we speak were able to be clearly distinguished from good then the choice we would face would be starker, and more grave. But we know, with Faust, that evil is but:

Ein Teil von jener Kraft
Die Stets das Bose will--
Und stets das Gute schaft.
In spite of the illusions of the philosophers of the enlightenment the desacralization of religion has not elevated reason; nor has the establishment of a middle class under a rule of law in and of itself guaranteed the life of the culture, or even eternally vouchsafed democratic principles. It was not Marx who first foresaw "the withering away of the state," but rather it was Rousseau and other utopian philosophers. Indeed each age of the world seems uniquely confident that the harmonious millennium is just about to begin, and it seems equally to go without notice when this fails to occur. This might led one to conclude that the essentially mythic structure of "liberation", and other such archetypes, have more to do with the pattern of history than does any mere sequence of events. Ideas and mythic structures do operate to impose a comprehensible reality upon the stream of events. These myths quite often demonstrate to us just how little of "world-significance" the spume of history contains, and how easily "events" are made to conform to a pre-existent pattern. When we wish to isolate grandeur or horror, we are left only with grandeur or horror, not a "universal" meaning. The world, as the philosopher Wittgenstein said, is the "totality of facts, not things"; so if we wish to understand the depths of history then we must plummet the relationships, the forms through which history is enacted. The enantidromia, or a cycle of opposites is one such form. This form, in which willed evil is translated to good suggests powerfully that it is stasis, not movement, which lies at the foundation of history. If a ball is bounced from wall to wall within a sphere there is an apparent movement for the observer of the ball within the sphere. From outside that sphere, however, there is stasis. The momentum of history is arbitrary, but it is consistently thrown forward by its own inequity. As Anaximander taught "All things make reparation unto one another according to their injustice in the ordering of time."

Here, where the structure of history intersects its human meaning we ought to address the failure of liberalism or ameliorism. The ameliorist believes that evil can be controlled, suppressed, or ultimately eliminated. It is this point of view that actually represents the greatest danger to the present, and therein to both a clear understanding of the past and a better future. Instead of seeing the conflict of opposites as an ancient and enduring tragedy, the ameliorist would prefer to eliminate or "solve" the question of good and evil. Ameliorism has all but ruined modern politics and continues to dominate in present-day social science where it has established its reign in behaviorist psychology. Even the humanities have become affected as a nihilistic outlook called "decontruction" has become a dominant form of criticism. All such trends cannot help but fail to make us aware of our own moral choices.

It will always be easy to propose sweeping panaceas and to watch the world come to embrace them. But we need to be sure that our contemporary history is saved from the progressive destruction of ameliorism, which like sophistry, is always capable of proposing a "better" way of dealing with the daemonic admixture of good and evil in the world. Instead of this we should be moved by both reason and passion toward an enactment of history without illusions.

The End of Politics: Toward a Victimless History

If the vast play of history could be played backwards, like an early film, in stark black and white, what would we see? What would we see of ourselves, of our Gnostic insecurity and Promeathean defiance, of our vanity, greed and our pettiness? What would stand out as the frames of our century flipped backwards; as the horrible atrocities passed; followed by the pointless slaughter of armies, the collective lunacy or revolutionary fervor of masses, the dismantling and collapse of states, the nihilistic fury of terrorists, the genocide of millions? How would the hopeful, if less frequent moments of nobility or good strike us? Would they seem only fits of straw in a hurricane, or would they elevate the entire struggle and even endow it with a dramatic meaning? What would we see if the film continued further back, into the nineteenth century with its autocrats and explorers, its aristocratic ease and working-class despair, its awkward liberalism standing guiltily in the shadow of industrial oligarchy? Where would we find ourselves as the film reached mid-point of that century and black men stood before us as slaves in the United States and white Russians as serfs in Czarist Russia? Where would we be then? Could we acknowledge this as our paternity and blood inheritance? Or would it seem only a comedy, an opera buffa at which our futuristic egos would scoff? As the film reached further backwards through the mist of the Napoleanic wars, could we ourselves suppress a cry of joy to find ourselves in the streets of Paris where copies of the Rights of Man and Citizen shouted across the air? Would we then not feel with men their innocence and their joy as they washed themselves free of monarch, nobility and clergy and embraced the light of natural religion in the sreets of Paris? If we were not traveling forward but backward, how great must be our happiness to return through so much horror and waste to find a moment of pure hope and utopian expectation. The danger in history, as this example shows, is not that it appears to move, but rather that it appears to move only in one direction. Yet this is not the expression of its being but rather its telos, or ultimate goal. Yet to see the present lying in the past is to act upon the present with the suspicion necessary to reveal that telos. It was a uniquely Hebraic idea that the creator must reveal himself in the movement of history toward a telos, rather than in the very existence from which history is derivative. We need not so readily accept the sacredness of a historical telos. It is also possible to accept being itself as an expression of the sacred. Freedom in history would thus become freedom from history, especially as a dominant way of being in the world and a ceaseless existential pressure upon us. To acknowledge a more fundamental freedom would be to acknowledge the coalescence of linear history to a singularity. For just as a black hole is the condensation of all the matter of an exploded star, so all of the meaningful action of linear history can be compressed into a way of action in the present, into a moral derived from contemplation.

A politics of means alone is the end of politics. This has, in fact, already occurred in our time. We no longer have a politics. Political questions, which formerly required hierarchical, philosophical and social thought, now require only "economic management". The reduction of politics to the distribution of material goods certainly eviscerates history of any telos whatsoever. Contemporary western culture is thus in the ironic position of seeking a teleological justification for politics when the practice of politics no longer encloses the search for a just society whose construction would alone justify such a telos. Thus, as the century closes and the millennium opens, we appear to be in free fall, neither entirely the actors of history nor its passive authors. Perhaps this is that same spirit which reigned after the fall of Rome and before the medieval synthesis came about; we belong between two worlds and are full members of neither.

But history-- if we would revision it and be transformed within it, is not so easily escaped. "History" James Joyce wrote, "is the nightmare from which I am struggling to awake." The terror of history is just this randomness, this numinosity lurching from event to event, this obsessive reverie which forces its own pattern and logic over nature's plenum.

To summarize the terror of history would be a great task. Not only would we need to catalogue the miseries of famine, plague, war, and revolution; but the very existential dread of "what will come next" would have to be accounted for. How could one begin to list the innumerable woes of history? No matter how far back we look we see that history is little more that the record of follies, catastrophes and misfortunes. Even the great historian Gibbon, writing over two hundred years ago, carefully describes the number of captives, men, women and children, whom the "civilizing" Romans put to death upon the conquest of their cities. We certainly have every reason to doubt that the genocides we have witnessed in modern times are entirely without precedent. It would seem more reasonable to assume that they are not unique, and that every where and every time has been possessed of the same bloodthirsty inclinations, which even if not acted upon, extend, in fact, into pre-history. The matter of history is thus not to sort victims from perpetrators, but to recognize that ultimately, from the contemporary perspective, there are nothing but victims.

The American Indians were victims, the Jews of Europe were victims, the Cambodians under Pol Pot were victims and Pol Pot himself a victim, Israelis are victims, Palestinians are victims, equally the Czar Nicholas and his family were victims and the Communists who followed them victims, along with, notwithstanding good or evil, Julius Caesar, the Boers in Africa, the British in India, the Americans in Vietnam. Today, the man in the street is a victim of history, and he will be more than glad to explain to you just how this is so. History contains nothing but victims, which should not surprise us. For if history's telos is endowed with a metaphysical meaning then are not the crimes or violence committed in its wake but a part of its divinely inspired order? We hesitate to elaborate upon so simple a fact, yet it is indisputable that the history of violence only emerges from the violence of history; and that a history without a telelogical justification would be a history entirely answerable to its victims, and one which could perhaps, justify fewer such crimes and sacrifices.

Consequently, it cannot be considered an immoral position to hold that all "victims" of history are essentially equal. They are not all equal in the degree of their suffering, but they are profoundly equal in that they are sacrificed to an abstraction, invariably one with political, religious or chiliast overtones. For history's human sacrifices are offered up in a three part pattern, which one may observe from many times and places around the world. The victims of history are first berated as those who stand in the way of the future or history. Then they are then suppressed or extirpated to make way for that future. Finally they are elevated to the status of martyrs for the entire mistaken pattern, which then, dignified by its "historical" status, is free to be repeated in another time and place. The compunction to create heroes from an enemies also serves the purpose of camouflaging and rationalizing the essentially arbitrary nature of violence within history. Thus do we feel compelled to assert that violence is committed by men upon other men, not by "history" upon them.

This need to rationalize events might be called the enantidromia of forgetfulness. An example of this pattern from contemporary affairs easy presents itself. The west today sees itself uniquely at the mercy of Muslim religious fanatics, and yet it was only a few centuries ago that Europe invaded and occupied their homeland in the name of our religion. At that time it was the Catholic Church that blessed these "holy wars," from the steps of the cathedrals of medieval Europe. It is insufficient to point to the longevity of the turning (periagoge) of this cycle in order to argue that the length of time which has passed simply excuses the feelings of another age. For it is structural forms like these which reveal a deep logic in the sweep of history's narrative; and while that narrative's meaning may be challenged, its logic cannot.

If we wish to wake from the nightmare of history we must understand that until we are liberated from strict linearity and teleological justification we will not be free from the terror of history. Historians since Thucydides have noted how the field of political judgment has been occluded by the fatalism of events. The much touted "freedom" of history has thus been steadily eroding in the west for many centuries; until in our own time, there hardly seems any such "freedom" left to celebrate. Yet still we remain bound, even as a planetary civilization, to the progress and telos of history as the sole source of salvation. It is time to consider another mode of existence in the world, one which would valorize not just a succession of events, but being itself.

Being Versus History

History is the flow of events. These events move from what we do not know, toward what we do not know. Yet history has a beginning, a present, and a ultimate end. Being, however, is that which over-arches all events and extends beyond them. Being, unlike history, is a renewable resource, for each individual's being partakes of the collectivity of life, and is sustained by this archetype. Being, moreover, is circumscribed by death, and thus recognizes a limit to the striving and constructions of the ego. History, as a metaphysical and trans-historical process recognizes no such boundary. In history we summarize ourselves as we are, not as we ought to be.

The life-time of one man, born in 1900, and still alive today would compromise, at ninety-eight, whole revolutions in customs and technology. During these years technology has moved from horse and buggy transportation, whose predecessors went back to ancient times, to computers, which have no predecessor. Equally, today's social developments might well confound the society of 1900. Modernity as a whole, as that period following the French Revolution must thus occupy a special place in our imagination, as much for its staggering rapidity of change, as for the image of history which it presents, especially when seen against the background of earlier, more leisurely epochs.

We stand at the summit of a century of explosive and subversive change, the conclusion of the industrial and the acceleration of the post industrial revolutions. It would be futile and false to believe that all these changes have improved the moral lot of man, or even made his life qualitatively better than in former times. A clear example is communication. We have definitively solved the problem of communication and of information, but in drawing the world into a single "noosphere", we cannot, for all our technical mastery, make what IS communicated any more significant than it was in ancient Egypt or Babylon. Our technological progress is no longer driven by the processes of science which were its origin, but rather has become the means and ends of our economic order. Our civilization is increasingly driven by the products of technology not through them. We are thus at the conclusion of an age of technical innovation, with no step left on the ladder which could generate a social improvement commensurate with our technical progress.

To meditate upon our relationship to the past and to the future is simply a waste of time if we cannot tie this effort to the unsolved moral dilemma which Rousseau posed at the beginning of the modern period. How can a civilization advance while morals do not? What right of superiority can we claim if our culture provides no truer freedom than that already supplied in primitive or traditional societies? The debate turns ultimately upon a simple question: If we are civilized, where is the evidence that our "history" creates fewer victims than do rudimentary tribes or societies? If we are a civilization which offers up fewer sacrifices than others do, then we may rightly claim to be "advanced"; but if we cannot, then progress and linear history, as assumed and celebrated since the enlightenment, are merely dangerous allusions. Reason and passion have moved us some distance toward a history without victims, but the evidence does not yet show that we have, in fact, created such a civilization. Our technical accomplishments have brought us to the threshold of a world civilization, but it remains to be seen whether those accomplishments can provide the foundation for a culture free of the old national nativisims. This potential civilization is not a "new world order", rather it would be better exemplified in a Taoist moral order than in the good behavior of nation-states. It will need to spring from the hearts and minds of many individuals around the world in order to take root and to transform the future. Most of all, it will have to valorize being as an antidote to history. The solution to history is not more of it, but less. History's quarrels can never be settled in history, since they survive upon endless predicates. Indeed, the essence of history is predicate. History is fate and history is fall, and until we unravel these two we shall remain bound by their consequences. The power of the nation-state and its mythology, for example, will not diminish until the nexus of conflict which gave rise to that identity is dissolved. The extenuation of historical conflict is thus brought about by history and justified by history, and until that rationale is over-thrown, historical conflict will endure through all the generations of men. The solution to history is thus not the futile attempt to become "liberated" from it, or to free the past from futuristic overpowerment. These actions only compound the problem by extending historical predication and justification into infinity. The solution to history is to step outside it and to let the sacred values of being wash over the present, and from thence, affect both past and future.

To understand the past and the future it is necessary to address them as potentialities which exist only in the present. Then we must employ our own moral contemplation to achieve the right balance of the Tao, the right mindfulness of the Buddhist EightFold path, in which the "pondering of being and non-being are given up." (What we might ask, is history, but just this despair which results from too much pondering of being?) It is not liberation from history that we require, but liberation from the narrow self, the source of history's construction. For too long we have sought to have it both ways, we have wished to have the existential freedom and glory of the march of events, and we have wished to consider these events as at least partakers in a divine drama. It is now time for mankind to move beyond this stage and into an understanding of the sacred as that which lies even beyond the aperion, that unlimited which fascinated the Greeks. Our new cosmology as well as the discoveries of modern physics and astronomy compel us to this, just as the conspicuous failure of political modernity forces us, at the end of the millennium, to discover a new relationship to ourselves.

But in order to become the inheritors of the future we must first act with good faith in the present. This faith cannot be expressed by conventional culture of any kind. It will only arise by the concurrent effort of many individuals, whose individual lives will first be altered in attendance upon a greater transformation. When we have achieved a society which is integrated into nature, and into which nature's daemonic is integrated, then every man and woman may be able to realize his full potential in the present, and only when that is achieved may we consider ourselves the inheritors of a future and the knowing stewards of a past.

Goethe, writing in his old age, reflected upon this daemonic in nature, as that element which cannot be consciously molded by civilization, nor either speeded up or slowed down according to human conceit. Looking back, as we are, over nearly a century of change in which he had been an actor Goethe wrote that he:

"...discovered in nature, animate and inanimate, with soul and without soul, something which was only manifested in contradictions, and therefore could not be grasped under one conception, still less under one word. It was not godlike for it seemed unreasonable; not human, for it had no understanding; not devilish, for it was beneficent; not angelic, for it often showed malicious pleasure. It resembled chance, for it exhibited no consequence; it was like Providence, for it hinted at connection. Everything which limits us seemed by it to be penetrable; it seemed to sport in an arbitrary fashion with the necessary elements of our being; it contracted time and expanded space. Only in the impossible did it seem to find pleasure, and the possible it seemed to thrust from itself with contempt.

This principle, which seemed to step in between all other principles, to separate them and to unite them, I named the Daemonic..."

To recognize and to accept the Daemonic in nature would be to recognize and to protect it in ourselves. For this is the power that mirrors the unpredictable freedom of history. Yet it is not itself history, for it, "contracts time and expands space". The daemonic is the simultaneity of freedom and constraint, of cause and effect, of necessity and chance; and as Goethe saw, its rightful realm is not Time, but Nature, not History, but Being.

Only where this daemonic freely reigns, and is not suppressed, can man have a comprehensible past, as well as an open-ended future.

Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?

Abstract

On the occasion of the last great European essay contest the philosopher Rousseau suggested that the dream of progress might be an illusion. We ask a different question, not about social progress, but about historical order. There is no past, however, outside of that which we construct from memory and imagination, for if we attempt to have a "science" of history we simply generate an ideology. Only myth gives real structure to events, and formalizes their pattern. Death too, as a human reality, divides the present from the past. In this sense the individual is the maker of history, and the sole possessor of its significance. In a hierarchy of forms, man embodies eternal processes of time. The remembrance of things past thus becomes the human past, which is the construction of memory through imagination.

To understand the past and the future we are compelled to interpret the present. The present may be called Gnostic and Promethean. Both guilt and faith drive these myths which justify the tensions in modernity. One way of conceiving of this tension is as an enantidromia, formulated by Heraciltus before the time of Christ. Our world environmental crisis, or our relationship to our own senses expresses the guilt we have for surpassing nature in Promethean faith.

Evil persists, yet it is continually attenuated by unforseen good. Myth orders the spume of events. History only appears to move because it must right previous inequities. Social or political ameliorism is thus largely an illusion. Evil cannot be compromised or eliminated since it is part of the world's constitution.

Can we separate ourselves from ourselves? Is it inevitable that we deny history by refusing to see that we are its authors? We do not need to accept the telos as scared. Being too, outside history, is scared. We can no longer justify a telos with our politics.

History is essentially terror. Insisting on freedom, western man has also welcomed this unpredictability and terror. Everyone is history's victim at some point in history. Would there be so many victims without a telos or linear justification?

History, accepted as an abstract inevitability, is only a collective rationalization. The march of events has now occluded that freedom which was its justification.

Can we now answer Ms. Rousseau? Only being can assert new values in an age propelled by the creation of technology and small social progress. History's quarrels cannot be settled in history, since they survive on endless predicates. The solution to history is not more of it, but less. The self, addressed by the major religious traditions, must be lifted out of history. Being is the foundation of the scared. It is not liberation from history that we require, but liberation from the narrow self, the source of history's construction. Only if we honor the daemonic, the simultaneity of freedom and constraint, cause and effect, necessity and chance, can we achieve freedom within history.