The Background of Order and History
My History of Political Ideas started from the conventional assumptions that there are ideas, that they have a history, and that a history of political ideas would have to work its way from classical politics up to the present. Under these assumptions, I humbly worked through the sources, and eventually a manuscript of several thousand pages was in existence.1
Still, the various misgivings that had arisen in the course of the work now crystallized into my understanding that a history of political ideas was a senseless undertaking, incompatible with the present state of science. Ideas turned out to be a secondary conceptual development, beginning with the Stoics, intensified in the high Middle Ages, and radically unfolding since the eighteenth century. Ideas transform symbols, which express experiences, into concepts—which are assumed to refer to a reality other than the reality experienced. And this reality other than the reality experienced does not exist. Hence, ideas are liable to deform the truth of the experiences and their symbolization.
The points at which misgivings had to arise are obvious. In the first place, there is no continuity between the so-called ideas of the Greek philosophers from the seventh to the fourth century B.C. and the contents of Israelite prophetic and New Testament revelatory writings. These two symbolizations touch different areas of experience and are not historically connected. Moreover, the further one traces back the conventional origin of ideas, the more it becomes clear that such symbolisms as myth and revelation can by no stretch of the imagination be classified as “ideas.” One must acknowledge a plurality of symbolisms. A Hesiodian theogony, for instance, is simply not a philosophy in the Aristotelian sense, even though the structure of reality expressed by myth and philosophy is the same—a sameness of structure already recognized by Aristotle. Problems were arising that I tried to express through such concepts as “compact,” or “primary experience of the cosmos,” and the “differentiations” that lead to the truth of existence in the Hellenic Classic, the Israelite, and the early Christian sense. In order to characterize the decisive transition from compact to differentiated truth in the history of consciousness, I used, at the time, the term leap in being, taking the term leap from Kierkegaard’s Sprung.
The focus of my interest thus moved from ideas to the experiences of reality that engendered a variety of symbols for their articulation. That is not to say that the problem of ideas now simply disappeared. Of course it was very much present, but I only gradually found out what it was. An important point, for instance, which grew in clarity over the years, was the understanding that the transformation of original experiences-symbolizations into doctrines entailed a deformation of existence, if the contact with the reality as experienced was lost and the use of the language symbols engendered by the original experiences degenerated into a more or less empty game. Some of the most obvious things about this deformation I discovered rather late, only in the 1950s and 1960s. I had not been clearly aware, for instance, that the term metaphysics is not a Greek term but an Arabic deformation of the Greek title of Aristotle’s meta ta physica; that it had been taken over from the Arabs by Thomas and used for the first time in a Western language in the introduction to his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics; and that ever since there existed an odd science that was called metaphysics. Hence, the not-quite unjustified criticism of such doctrinal metaphysics by the thinkers of the Enlightenment and early positivism did not touch the problems of Classic philosophy at all. Classic philosophy was not too well known at the time; and it is still little known today, because the cliché metaphysics has become the magic word by which one can cast a shadow on all philosophical analysis in the Classic sense.
I had to give up “ideas” as objects of a history and establish the experience of reality—personal, social, historical, cosmic—as the reality to be explored historically. These experiences, however, one could explore only by exploring their articulation through symbols. The identification of the subject matter and, with the subject matter, of the method to be used in its exploration led to the principle that lies at the basis of all my later work: the reality of experience is self-interpretive. The men who have the experiences express them through symbols, and symbols are the key to understanding the experiences expressed. There is no sense in pretending that the Egyptian priests, for instance, who wrote the Theology of Memphis or the Mesopotamian priests who developed the Sumerian King-List were not able to articulate experiences clearly because they had other problems than a Voltaire, or a Comte, or a Hegel. What is experienced and symbolized as reality, in an advancing process of differentiation, is the substance of history. My work on the History of Political Ideas had not been done in vain, because it had familiarized me with the historical sources. But now the reorganization of the materials under the aspect of experience and symbolization became necessary. Hence, I gave up the project of a History of Political Ideas and started my own work on Order and History.2
At the time, it seemed to me that Order and History had to begin with the Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires and their cosmological symbolization of personal and social order. Against this background of cosmological, imperial symbolism occurred the breakthrough of Israelite revelation. Not in continuity with the pneumatic prophets but independently, there occurred the outburst of noetic thinking in the Greek philosophers. The study of the Near Eastern and Israelite experiences down to the period of Christ filled the first volume of Order and History, and the evolution of the corresponding Greek experiences from the cosmological origins to the noetic differentiation filled volumes 2 and 3. According to the original plan, these volumes were to have been followed by studies on empire, medieval imperialism and spiritualism, and the modern development.
That plan, however, proved unrealizable. Considerable parts of it were in fact written, but the work broke down on the question of volume. I always ran into the problem that, in order to arrive at theoretical formulations, I had first to present the materials on which the theoretical formulations were based as an analytical result. If I went through with the program, the sequel to the first three volumes would have been not another three volumes as planned but perhaps six or seven volumes more. The general public was unfamiliar with the sources that led to certain theoretical insights, so the theoretical insights could not be presented without the sources.
I decided, therefore, to make a number of special studies on certain problems of early Christianity; the mytho-speculative form of historiogenesis; the transition from historiogenetic speculation to historiography; the problem of the ecumene as developed by Herodotus, Polybius, and the Chinese historians; certain modern theoretical problems, such as the sorcery involved in Hegel’s construction of his system; and so forth. It seemed to make better sense to publish two volumes with these special studies, arriving more quickly at the theoretical results, than to fill numerous volumes with discussions of sources, especially since over the years what I had seen in the 1940s and 1950s as a problem had also been seen by others, and the historical exploration of such problems as Gnosticism, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Nag Hammadi finds, the prehistory of Pseudo-Dionysius, the revival of neo-Platonism in the Renaissance and its influences on subsequent intellectual Western developments up to Hegel, had made enormous progress, so that now I could refer to the studies of the sources conducted by a great number of scholars—sources that had not been accessible to the public in the 1940s and 1950s when I first developed the conception of Order and History. I want to stress the development just mentioned, because it could not be foreseen at the time I started my work. We are living today in a period of progress in the historical and philosophical sciences that hardly has a parallel in the history of mankind.
As a matter of fact, a number of the theoretical assumptions from which I started when I began to write Order and History have become obsolete through this rapid development of the historical sciences, especially in the fields of prehistory and archeology. When I wrote the first volume of Order and History, my horizon was still limited by the Near Eastern empires. I identified the cosmological symbolism that I found there with the imperial symbolism of Mesopotamia and Egypt. On the basis of the new expansion of our prehistoric and archeological knowledge, I can now say that practically all of the symbols that appear in the ancient Near East have a prehistory reaching through the Neolithicum back into the Paleolithicum, for a period of some twenty thousand years before the Near Eastern empires. There has arisen the new problem of disengaging the general problem of cosmological symbolism from its specific, imperial variation; the cosmological symbolisms on the tribal level, back to the Stone Age, must be analyzed; and then the differentia specifica, introduced by the foundation of empires, as for instance in Egypt, must be distinguished. I have collected the materials for this purpose; and I hope to publish my findings sometime in the future.3
Another great advance in science that had been in the making for many decades has more recently found its decisive support through the recalibration of radiocarbon dates, beginning in 1966. The conception of a unilinear history, which had already been quite shaky in view of the chronologically parallel developments in the Near East, China, India, and Hellas, now definitely breaks down when the temple cultures in Malta, for instance, can be dated substantial periods of time before the Pyramid Age in Egypt. Independent neolithic civilizations precede in time the imperial civilizations in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian areas. Findings of this nature are accumulating in such quantities that one can say definitely even now that the older conception of a unilinear history, which still dominates the vulgarian level in the form of epigonal constructions in the wake of Condorcet, Comte, Hegel, and Marx, is definitely obsolete. The history of mankind has become diversified, because the differentiating developments were so widely dispersed. The field can be characterized as pluralistic. The progress, or general advance, of an imaginary abstract “mankind” has dissolved into the manifold of differentiating acts occurring at various points in time and independently in concrete human beings and societies.
The possibility of civilizational advance through cultural diffusion has not been excluded by these new aspects of history, but the problem must be pushed back to a much earlier period. As Carl Hentze once said to me in a conversation, if the history of articulate expression of experiences goes back for fifty thousand years, anything can have happened in that time; what can be found by way of cultural parallels in the so-called historical period after 3000 B.C. must be seen against the vast background of human social contacts in such time spans. To give an example: We have by now an excellent literature on Polynesian cultures, their art, and their myth. What is sometimes not realized is the fact that the Polynesians did not spring from the earth on the Polynesian islands but migrated there from the Asiatic mainland. This migration hardly began before the eighth century B.C. Hence, before that time the tribal developments that today we call Polynesian and other tribal developments that resulted in the rise of Chinese civilization belonged to the same area of culture. It is not surprising, therefore—as again Hentze observes—that there are highly interesting parallels between ornaments of Polynesian origin and ornaments on the vases of the Shang Dynasty.
The splendid advance of science in our time should not, however, induce rash expectations regarding the death of ideologies and their social effectiveness. The discrepancies between science and ideology are of long standing. As a matter of fact, certain ideological tenets were developed in flat contradiction to ordinary historical facts well known at the time and especially to the ideological thinkers. When Marx and Engels, for instance, begin their Communist Manifesto with the proposition that all social history hitherto has been the history of class struggle, they are talking impertinent nonsense, because there were, after all, other struggles in history, well known to Marx and Engels from their high school days, such as the Persian Wars, the conquests of Alexander, the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars, and the expansion of the Roman empire, which had definitely nothing to do with class struggles. If ideologists can make such propagandistic nonsense statements and get away with them for more than a century, one should not expect the expansion of our historical knowledge through science to make a dent in the corrupt existence of the ideological epigone in our own time. These last remarks, however, should not be understood as expressing a profound pessimism. That happens to be an eighteenth-century mood and is today somewhat anachronistic.
1. The History of Political Ideas is now published in CW, vols. 19–26.
2. Order and History consists of vols. 14–18 of the present edition.
3. Alas, a hope not fulfilled.