History: Conceptions of History
The consciousness, evident in European and several other civilisations, of the emergence and continuity of a people’s collective destiny in time.
History is profoundly tragic. This is why both bourgeois and egalitarian spirits reject it. Whether Marxist or, today, liberal-cosmopolitan, these spirits have always sought the end of history, synonymous with the valley of tears. Since the fall of Communism, the present Western/American ideology implicitly strives for the end of history, seeking to establish a ‘New World Order’, a unified planet. History, though, is making a thunderous comeback, with the inevitable confrontations that come from an increasingly multipolar world.
There are three great, opposed conceptions of history: the cyclical conception; the linear, finalist conception; and the spherical conception.
1. The cyclical conception found in primitive or ancient societies holds that everything is eternally repeated, and nothing ever changes. History is a loop, a recommencement, a succession of ‘ages’ that returns again and again.
2. The linear and finalist conception (teleonomic and soteriological) was introduced by Judaeo-Christianity: history’s dynamic inevitably culminates in the Last Judgment. This conception was adopted by Western ideologies, elaborated in the thought of Hegel and Marx (as well as cosmopolitan liberals), and secularised the Judaeo-Christian vision of heaven. Such a notion of Salvation, naïve and sullied by a belief in Progress distinct to an exhausted modernity, continues to dominate the prevailing ideology, like an exorcism, though everything suggests that the Twenty-first century will refute its infantile optimism.
3. The ‘spherical’ conception of history, formulated by Nietzsche and developed by Giorgio Locchi,[1] is this tragic, surhuman, and Faustian philosophy whose dynamic is no longer based on an eternally recurring cycle or a predetermined linear movement (‘the meaning of history’), but by the ‘eternal return of the identical’ (not the ‘same’). The past can be reappropriated, even transformed, at any moment by a project of renewal. This position is spherical, like a ball that rolls across a flat surface, with its different points touching the same phases of ascension, decadence, war, peace, crisis, etc., that constantly return, but in different situations and modalities. The present in this way fuses the immemorial past with a desired future. Tradition and futurism become here the same willed energy. The future remains open, unlike archaic pagan cyclicalism or Judaeo-Christian linearity — both of which are deterministic.
Europeans would do well to take inspiration from this Nietzschean-Locchian notion in order to regenerate their history, for they have left history — they are no longer its master, having abdicated their destiny to foreigners. The spherical conception of history is anti-fatalistic, accepting that an unwanted decadence or an unforeseen regeneration is always a possibility. Europe’s present decline (especially demographically, ethnically, and spiritually) is not irreversible. Anything can happen: divine as well as evil surprises are the lot of history, this torrent whose course no one can foresee. But if the torrent is a succession of metamorphoses that are slow or brutal, painful or bearable, usually unforeseeable, it’s nevertheless important to realise that Europe’s historical regeneration will be ‘a leap into the unknown’ — anything but peaceful.
(see archeofuturism; destiny, becoming; end of history)
- ↑ Giorgio Locchi (1923-1992) was an Italian journalist who was a founding member of GRECE and an occasional collaborator with Alain de Benoist. He also wrote on Wagner and Nietzsche. He remains untranslated.
