Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Hitler and the Germans

Titel: Hitler and the Germans

Stichwort: Unbewältigte Vergangenheit (unmastered past); Bedeutung von Gegenwart (Präsenz unter Gott); Verlust an Sprache (Deutschland)

Kurzinhalt: The Cliche of the "Unmastered Past" versus the "Presence under God"

Textausschnitt: 5. The Cliche of the "Unmastered Past" versus the "Presence under God"
70a Let us now enter into the matter itself. I must draw up and analyze a whole series of concepts before we can treat materials objectively. The first concept is the concept of the unmastered past, about which, as you well know, there has been an extraordinary amount of discussion. When we hear the expression "the unmastered past," a series of questions immediately crops up: What does that really mean, in the first place? For whom is this past unmastered, assuming that we know at all what "mastering" means: for all, or for only a few people? Because it indeed was mastered by very many while it was still the present, since by no means did all the people who experienced the period of National Socialism cheerfully cooperate with it. Some were against it instinctively, because of tradition, etc. But some also knew precisely what was going on. That is to say, what is today the unmastered past, for people at the level of a Schramm or an Augstein, was a completely masterable present for the people who lived at that time. I mastered Hitler even before he came to power, and many others did too. So for whom is that an unmastered past? (Fs)

70b And if it is not mastered, what does that really mean-that it is not mastered as past? Again one can ask, Why should it be mastered? For it has indeed passed. And consequently if there is somehow the feeling that there is still something to master in the past, then we are coming to what I have continually pointed toward in all these examples, that we live in an unmastered present. Here is the first thesis for our analysis of the problem of the unmastered past: It really is an unmastered present. (Fs)
71a What now is the unmastered present? First, what is the present? The present can mean two things. In the first place, one can speak today of the ideologically and socially usual idea of the present as a point in the present (Gegenwartspunkt) lying between past and future. So the time of history is represented as going in a line from the past to the future through a point in the present, and from this viewpoint one understands the present. Thus contemporary events are events that occur in the year 1964; past events occurred in the year 1930. Against this linear conception of the present, which has existed only since the eighteenth century in this form as a thoroughly ideological notion, there is that other meaning of the present, in which the present is always related to the existence of man in his presence (Prsenz) under God. Insofar as - while existing and acting in immanent time - man exists under God, he has presence. And the meaning of the past and the future will become generally interpretable only when starting out from this presence. For otherwise everything would proceed irrelevantly in an external stream of time. What now does mastering the present mean? Under mastering the present there is a virtue to be understood, the virtue of placing the present of immanent time under the judgment of the presence under God. This kind of mastering, then, is a general human problem, not something of the modern era, not something for Germans only, but for everyman: to place the immanent present within the immanent process under the judgment of the presence. (Fs) (notabene)

71b These questions were clarified and formulated for the first time in classic politics, by Plato in the Politeia and in the Gorgias. To place oneself under the presence, under the presence of God, and according to that to adjudicate what one does as man and how one forms the order of one's own existence and the existence of society, that for Plato is an act of judgment. That means that man is always under judgment; hence the myths of judgment in the Gorgias and the Politeia. And because he is always under judgment, under the presence of God, in the sense of this "being-under-judgment" he must adjudicate how he acts and how others act and how this action brings about an order of society. For Plato, therefore, the judgment is above all the investigation of the not-being-present of the sophists as individual persons, and a not-being-present in the sense of the presence of the entire society insofar as it allows itself to be led and ordered-that means disordered-by sophistic ideas. So, what will be called political science arises in the critique of time in the sense of the empirically immanent society that does not place itself under the judgment in the presence of God. That is to say, the science of the order of man in society arises from the reaction against not existing in the present. We can say of Plato that he mastered the past of sophistry in a paradigmatic fashion, insofar as it reached into his time, and that he thereby mastered his own present and highlighted what the present, in the sense of this presence under God, meant. All science of politics begins with this. This mastering of the past, which is always a mastering of the present, was relatively simple in Plato's situation, for he had only to deal with the internal historical processes of the Hellenistic polis. (Fs) (notabene)

72a For us in the present situation the matter is much more complicated. We have a particular difficulty in mastering our present, since our society is dominated by different kinds of ideological principles and views-not only Marxist or National Socialist but also positivist, progressivist, secular-liberal, etc.-that erect the prevention of the mastering of the present into a principle. And this principle of prevention is already so old-it goes back at least two hundred years-that it has affected the entire Western, but particularly the German, situation and lays the greatest obstacles in the way of this very mastering, which has to be carried out again and again. So, if we wish to master the past in the sense of mastering the present, we are confronted with the task of clearing out all the ideological junk in order to make the conditio humana visible once again. (Fs) (notabene)

72b How can this be done? Again there are difficulties. For naturally one can only clear things out by becoming conscious of the presence and by having at one's disposal the expressions adequate for making it conscious. These adequate expressions are of course to be found in classical philosophy, in the whole history of Christianity, of scholasticism, etc., in humanistic philosophy up to the eighteenth century; they are absolutely the dominant ones. But under the influence of the development of the ideologies, which took over the classic and Christian vocabulary for understanding presence and reinterpreted it as an instrument for the prevention of knowledge of the presence under God, the words have simply changed their meanings. Therefore it is not easy even to speak about what is at issue here-for example, about the truth of existence, or freedom of existence under God-nor to speak about reason as the organ sensitive for the reception of transcendent being, or about the spirit, etc., for all these expressions have become ideologized. And this is an international, not only a German, problem. (Fs) (notabene)

73a However, the Western peoples are in a more favorable situation, even though all the ideological dirt has piled up there too. But still, traditionally in the institutions, in the universities, in literary works, the classic, humanistic, and Christian tradition has remained preserved in a way of which you, if you live only in Germany, can have absolutely no idea. There is such a tremendous reserve of tradition in existence, of such strength, that although these ideological phenomena certainly do emerge and are felt as phenomena of disorder and corruption in the social body, there is still enough healthy substance there to make it possible to be understood when one speaks of such things. (Fs)

73b In Germany now, for certain historical reasons, that is not the case, for the German philosophical language that we use here was first developed in the eighteenth century. The man who coined most of the German philosophical vocabulary was Christian Wolff, and after him, Kant. These were the two most important figures. Only from that time on do we have a German vocabulary for the treatment of the problems, developed during the period of the ideologies and therefore loaded from the beginning with the meanings of the Enlightenment and of Romantic gnosis. As a result, one cannot, as is possible for example in England and America or in France, still use expressions such as "intellect" or "spirit" or "reason" and assume that-at least by the educated section of the population, which is very numerous in these countries-these words will be understood as a Plato understood them, or a Saint Thomas or a Bodin, or seventeenth- and eigthteenth-century authors, or as how up to now English-speaking poets like T. S. Eliot understand them. This entire dimension of meaning, where these expressions were indeed created in order to elucidate and express the presence under God, has been essentially suppressed in the German language. So that when you are speaking of "reason" in public, it is extraordinarily difficult to get across that you mean something other than, for example, the "reason" occurring in the Critique of Pure Reason, Or if you are speaking of "spirit" that something other than what Hegel understood by "spirit" is meant, or than what after him the epigonic human sciences understood by "spirit." Or to get across that you understand by it, for example, what Aristotle or Plato understood by nous, or what was understood in the tradition of revelation by pneuma. For such things are indeed not sufficiently known to a socially relevant extent. (Fs) (notabene)

74a So these are essential complications, which in Germany are attenuated only because we still have-up to a certain level- churches as places of retreat for classic culture, too. But the churches in Germany can contribute very little to this, partly because the Protestant ones are indeed much too much linked with the formation of ideology through existentialism and the like, and the Catholic side adheres too strongly to the traditional language of theology, which is not adapted to the modern problematic. So here we have unavoidable difficulties, which we must gradually overcome. (Fs) (notabene)