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 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 in the concept of the Axis-time, the period in which, around 500 B.C., Heraclitus, the Buddha, and Confucius were contemporaries. Another aspect of this Ecumenic Age is the phenomenon which has given it its name—i.e., the imperial expansions through the Persians, Alexander, the Romans, the Maurya dynasty in India, and the Ch’in and Han dynasties in China. By about 200 B.C. we are no longer in a world of tribal societies or of small city states, but in the world of the ecumenic empires extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have spoken of an ecumenic consciousness, meaning thereby that the actors and contemporaries of the imperial events interpreted them as a discovery and conquest of what they called the ecumene, as did Herodotus, or Polybius, or in China the first historians Ssu-ma T’an and Ssu-ma Ch’ien. The symbol ecumene becomes the idée-force of this period; and ecumenic conquest in the sense of domination over contemporarily living mankind has remained a fundamental force of history ever since, even if in practice the realization of such ecumenic—which now would have to become global domination—has never been achieved. The Ecumenic Age, therefore, has to be characterized by three of its more spectacular phenomena: (1) the spiritual outbursts on which Karl Jaspers concentrated; (2) the imperial concupiscential outbursts that have always attracted the attention of historians; and (3) the beginnings of historiography, in which the disorder created by the destructive expansion of empire is weighed against the order established, and the order established is measured by the newly differentiated understanding of existential order.
This triadic structure of spiritual outburst, empire, and historiography characterizes a period in the history of mankind. In my opinion it has to supersede other constructions of history, even nonideological constructions, such as for instance Toynbee’s earlier assumption of civilizations as the ultimate units of historical study. Civilizations can hardly be maintained as ultimate units in the face of the multicivilizational empires created by the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander, and the Romans, and of their disintegration into ethnic subunits when the impetus of imperial expansion had run into various obstacles. Moreover, in order to arrive at the concept of civilization as the ultimate unit, Toynbee had to construct civilizational units in retrospect from the imperial establishments that he considered their last phase before a disintegrating interregnum. As a matter of fact, the “civilizations” that culminate in “ecumenic empires” did not exist before imperial expansion. There certainly is something like a continuity of Chinese history, say from the Classic Chou period into the Han and post-Han empire, but the Chinese civilization emerging from the imperial ordeal is definitely not the aggregate of tribal societies that entered into it in the eighth century B.C., and the society that emerged as a Graeco-Roman society from Greek and Roman imperial expansion is definitely not the Athens of Plato nor the Rome of the early republic. Civilizational societies are not ultimate units of history but products of highly unpleasant and murderous historical processes. I do not consider it permissible to project the civilizational societies that emerge from empires and retain the differentiation of ecumenic consciousness (even if in pragmatic politics they had to restrict their ambitions) back into the societies that entered into the process.
One can speak, therefore, of the Ecumenic Age as a period in the history of mankind from which new societies emerged in which other factors than the momentum of imperial conquest became effective. When a Roman empire breaks up into a Byzantine empire, a Western Latin empire into a new expanding Islamic empire in the Near East and North Africa, there is no sense in pretending that Graeco-Roman civilization is still going on. What has arisen are new social units based on new migratory movements, cultural receptions, and expansions, which take over the form of empire created in the ecumenic period and now absorb for their justification doctrinalized spiritual outbursts as their political theologies. Ecumenic empires and their turmoil are followed by orthodox empires—whether in a Confucian China or a Hinduist India, in an Islamic empire, in an Eastern Greek Orthodox or a Western Latin Orthodox empire. These new imperial civilizations, which as civilizational societies are by no means identical with the societies ruled by the ecumenic empires, have lasted on the whole until the new wave of turmoil and disruption in the so-called modern period.
None of these observations on discernible structures in the history of mankind, however, must now be converted in their turn into a doctrine. Orthodox empires are exposed to disintegration when major phenomena like the Western rediscovery of pagan antiquity, and at the same time the expansion of the natural sciences, open man’s consciousness to areas of reality that had been obscured by the imperially established orthodoxies. The modern period in this sense is therefore a disruption of imperial orthodoxy by a new awareness of reality. This new awareness, however, can in its turn—as it did—degenerate into an orthodoxy, this time of the progressivist ideological kind, because the new consciousness of reality has taken over from the orthodox imperial period the deformation of symbols into doctrine. The modern deformation can be characterized as an orthodoxy of alienation that excludes the most important area of reality—man’s relation to the divine ground—from consciousness. This new restriction of reality, of course, will last no more than the restrictions that characterized the orthodox imperial period, because the pressure of reality cannot be resisted forever.
However, the exclusion of existential order from public consciousness, in some instances through governmental power, is not the only factor that will disintegrate contemporary ideological ascendancies. We are beset by the same problem as the founders of both the earlier ecumenic and the later orthodox empires—the fact that there is such a thing as the ethnic and cultural diversification of mankind. The empire, for instance, that we call Roman was of course not Roman. It had a core of imperial expansion in the Republic of Rome, but this republic had to transcend its own borders even in order to organize the Italian tribal societies into a confederation, and even more so when it conquered other peoples who definitely did not belong to the cultural-ethnic units of Italy, which caused their resistance. The dissolution of the Roman empire followed roughly ethnic-cultural lines. The ethnic-cultural diversity of mankind is still an important factor in spite of the assiduous work of social and cultural destruction perpetrated by empires in the course of their expansion and self-preservation. It is unimaginable that, for instance, a Soviet empire can permanently maintain itself in its present form against the ethnic cultures of the non-Russian people who make up more than fifty percent of its population. We have similar problems on a minor scale in the United States, where the ethnic immigration that constitutes the American people has so far not been fully absorbed into a unitary civilization and where the increasing cultural self-awareness of various ethnic groups, which may take a century to become fully effective, will considerably transform American society. In the most obvious case, that of the famous Europe that does not exist, we have the problem of a considerable number of very marked and self-conscious ethnic cultures that emerged from the Christian orthodox empire in the West but have so far not yet merged into a new civilizational unit comparable to the Christian dominant establishment from which they broke out. The end of things, thus, has not come, and what a philosopher can contribute today to the understanding of an ongoing process is the understanding of the factors that make for integration and disintegration of the type just indicated.
1. Published in 1974 as The Ecumenic Age, CW, vol. 17.