Homo Bulla

The Remedies for the Terror of History

戯作三昧:

从去年十二月到现在，几乎每天都在想无论如何要给Mircea Eliade的Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return写一篇至少三千字的感想。Eliade的论证过程漏洞很明显，过度概括的嫌疑不小，但是……不写我难受得慌（。

可我写不出来啊_(:qゝ∠)_

在电脑前坐了很多个晚上，就是写不出来啊_(:qゝ∠)_

感觉自己已经是一条咸鱼了_(:qゝ∠)_

考虑过做个简单的笔记算了，但打开文档又恨不得把后半本书全都塞进笔记了【

就随便记一段好了，还不到两百页的书，惦记起来的时候直接重读一次也不麻烦【

From Hegel on, every effort is directed toward saving and conferring value on the historical event as such,the event in itself and for itself. In his study of the German Constitution, Hegel wrote that if we recognize that things are necessarily as they are, that is, that they are not arbitrary and not the result of chance, we shall at the same time recognize that they must be as they are. A century later, the concept of historical necessity will enjoy a more and more triumphant practical application: in fact, all the cruelties, aberrations, and tragedies of history have been, and still are, justified by the necessities of the "historical moment." Probably Hegel did not intend to go so far. But since he had resolved to reconcile himself with his own historical moment, he was obliged to see in every event the will of the Universal Spirit. This is why he considered "reading the morning papers a sort of realistic benediction of the morning." For him, only daily contact with events could orient man's conduct in his relations with the world and with God.

How could Hegel know what was necessary in history, what, consequently, must occur exactly as it had occurred? Hegel believed that he knew what the Universal Spirit wanted. We shall not insist upon the audacity of this thesis, which, after all, abolishes precisely what Hegel wanted to save in history--human freedom. But there is an aspect of Hegel's philosophy of history that interests us because it still preserves something of the Judaeo-Christian conception: for Hegel, the historical event was the manifestation of the Universal Spirit. Now, it is possible to discern a parallel between Hegel's philosophy of history and the theology of history of the Hebrew prophets: for the latter, as for Hegel, an event is irreversible and valid in itself inasmuch as it is a new manifestation of the will ofGod--a proposition really revolutionary, we should remind ourselves, from the viewpoint of traditional societies dominated by the eternal repetition of archetypes. Thus, in Hegel's view, the destiny of a people still preserved a transhistorical significance, because all history revealed a new and more perfect manifestation of the Universal Spirit. But with Marx, history cast off all transcendental significance; it was no longer anything more than the epiphany of the class struggle. To what extent could such a theory justify historical sufferings? For the answer, we have but to turn to the pathetic resistance of a Belinsky or a Dostoevski,for example, who asked themselves how, from the viewpoint of the Hegelian and Marxian dialectic, it was possible to redeem all the dramas of oppression, the collective sufferings, deportations, humiliations, and massacres that fill universal history. 

Yet Marxism preserves a meaning to history. For Marxism, events are not a succession of arbitrary accidents; they exhibit a coherent structure and, above all, they lead to a definite end--final elimination of the terror of history, "salvation." Thus, at the end of the Marxist philosophy of history, lies the age of gold of the archaiceschatologies. In this sense it is correct to say not only that Marx "brought Hegel's philosophy back to earth" but also that he reconfirmed, upon an exclusively human level, the value of the primitive myth of the age of gold, with the difference that he puts the age of gold only at the end of history, instead of putting it at the beginning too. Here, for the militant Marxist, lies the secret of the remedy for the terror of history: just as the contemporaries of a "dark age" consoled themselves for their increasing sufferings by the thought that the aggravation of evil hastens final deliverance, so the militant Marxist of our day reads, in the drama provoked by the pressure of history, a necessary evil, the premonitory symptom of the approaching victory that will put an end forever to all historical "evil."

 - Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Harper Torchbooks, 147-49 (1954)

您看，在某些和Marxism多少少少有点关系的国家， 不论是官方还是一部分勇于发声的民众似乎都具有一种几乎不可思议的justify the unjustifiable能力。这样的思考方式的形成是否和Eliade所描述的这种历史观有关系呢？这些国家走上了应该不怎么符合老马本人心意的道路，不过在我所知范围内他们好像也还是将“把历史的进程视为the epiphany of the class struggle” 这种特色史观保留在了教育和宣传系统中的（。