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23. Philosophy of History
- University of Missouri Press
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[127], (97) Lines: 606 t ——— -1.2pt Pg ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [127], (97) 23 Philosophy of History These various developments affect the problems of a philosophy of history. Philosophy of history as a topic does not go further back than the eighteenth century. From its beginning in the eighteenth century, it became associated with the constructions of an imaginary history made for the purpose of interpreting the constructor and his personal state of alienation as the climax of all preceding history. Until quite recently, philosophy of history has been definitely associated with the misconstruction of history from a position of alienation, whether it be in the case of Condorcet, Comte, Hegel, or Marx. This rigid construction of history as a huge falsification of reality from the position of an alienated existence is dissolving in the twentieth century. Once the deformation of existence, which leads to the construction of ideological systems, is recognized as such, the categories of undeformed human existence become the criteria by which deformed existence and systems must be judged. Hence, the ideological systems themselves become historical phenomena in a process that reflects, among other things, the human tension between order and disorder of existence. There are periods of order, followed by periods of disintegration, followed by the misconstruction of reality by disoriented human beings. Against such disintegration, disorientation, and misconception there arise the countermovements in which the fullness of reality is restored to consciousness. In the light of this conception of order and disorder, one can interpret certain aspects of the so-called modernity as an expression of deformed existence in the same sense in which Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, described the course of the war and its prehistory as a social kinesis—a feverish movement 127 autobiographical reflections [128], (98 Lines: 62 ——— 5.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [128], (98 of disintegration and disorder. This does not mean, however, that at the time of such movements, be it the period under survey by Thucydides or the modern kinesis since the eighteenth century, feverish disorder alone dominates the scene. Although “modernity ” in the pejorative sense is undeniably a characteristic of the modern period, there goes on, at the same time, the resistance to disorder, as well as the efforts to regain the reality lost or distorted. However one wishes to construct the concept of modernity, it will have to cover both the destruction of reality committed by alienated human beings (the ideological thinkers) for the purpose of their own aggrandizement, and the countermovement of philosophers and scholars, which in our time culminates in the splendid advance of the historical sciences, revealing as grotesque the ideological constructions that still dominate the scene. One can find today, on the one hand, a massive revisionist movement among American historians who rewrite the history of the Cold War with a Marxist bias and, on the other hand, the characterization of such activities as “para-Marxist buffoonery” by a scholar like Raymond Aron. If the concepts of order and disorder of existence are applied to the ever-increasing amount of historical materials, certain structural lines of meaning begin to emerge—always with the reservation , of course, that they may have to be revised in the light of advancing historical knowledge. One of the important results that will be incorporated in the forthcoming volume 4 of Order and History is the description of the Ecumenic Age.1 By Ecumenic Age is meant a period in the history of mankind extending roughly from the time of Zoroaster and the beginnings of the Achemenide conquest to the end of the Roman empire. This is the period in which the cosmological understanding of reality was definitely replaced by a new understanding of reality, centered in the differentiation of the truth of existence through Hellenic philosophy and the Christian revelatory experiences. Geographically, the Ecumenic Age extends from the Persian, and in its wake the Greek and Roman, developments in the West to the parallel development of ecumenic consciousness in the Far Eastern civilizations, especially in China. One of the aspects of this age has been caught 1. Published in 1974 as The Ecumenic Age, CW, vol. 17. 128 [44.204.204.14] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:38 GMT) philosophy of history [129], (99) Lines: 623 t ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [129], (99) in the concept of the Axis-time, the period in which, around 500 b.c., Heraclitus, the Buddha, and...