The ‘Dismantling’ of European History
by Guillaume Faye
Guillaume Faye argues that true historicity is captured through a superhumanistic and neopagan worldview that acknowledges the profound impact of technology on human consciousness and the dynamic experience of time.
This is the eleventh part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.
Judaeo-Christianity and egalitarianism seem to define humans as historical beings. However, this is not truly the case, as Judaeo-Christianity, in its eschatological, messianic, and segmented view of history, portrays it as transient. Both in Hegelian-Marxist messianism and in the progressive doctrine of liberal democracies, history is destined to be completed and (because it is ‘bad’) brought to an end through the establishment of worldwide justice and a globally pacified society, much like how the Second Coming in Judaeo-Christianity will end human history in favour of the Regnum Christi. In this worldview, man is fundamentally not a historical being; he is not eternally destined for history. He is only temporarily condemned to history. And salvation will deliver him from it, provided he escapes from ‘ought-to-be’. The Judaeo-Christian and egalitarian view of mankind, as previously mentioned, equates to a purely zoological perspective, as it excludes the three-dimensionality of human consciousness and does not define man as always a historical being.
In contrast, the superhumanistic view of mankind and the world, which could be called ‘neopagan’ and resurfaced in Europe with Nietzsche, asserts that human history has nothing to do with zoological life and ‘things’ (see Wilhelm Dilthey). History is a supravital, purely human affair, and only humans (potentially) possess historicity. They possess it uniquely because they experience time in a three-dimensional way.
Following this initial examination, we can answer the burning and controversial question regarding the quantitative and/or qualitative differences observed in various civilisations and their respective stages of development. Is European man ‘superior’ to others because he was the first to introduce modern technology? No, for technology belongs to the order of life, not the order of history. Technology emerges from the biological, as it is in the genetic nature of humans to be technicians to survive in their environment. Concerning human historicity (arguably the most important aspect), no civilisation is superior to another. All humans, from pre-Neolithic primitives to modern technologists, are moved by historicity, which reveals itself as ‘something other’ than life.
Even if a civilisation did not actualise this historicity, remaining, for example, outside of history, it could do so at any time and enter history, as African peoples did in the 20th century following European colonisation.
Human historicity raises another significant question. Would tradition not counteract this historicity by preventing memory from actualising into a plan, by forbidding humans from making ‘choices’ (the essential act of historical consciousness), and by imposing a programme? Would tradition not equate to a kind of zoological barrier, an echo of an animal past where species behaviour was dictated by genetic code? Here again, the answer is negative: tradition is not a programme in the form of a rigid code; it is also a matter of choice, a risky decision; it is part of historical consciousness. Every historical project (including every free choice) that is a self-projection of humans into the future requires the homothetic choice to project into the past, to reconstruct tradition.
Walter Otto reminds us that the ‘new civilisation’ emerging from the Achaean invasions restored its pantheon, and thus its religious traditions (the myth of Zeus defeating Cronus). A reinterpretation of the past and founding myths occurs whenever a new historical project comes to light. Generally, no projection into the future, no choice, can be made without the support of tradition. We can even claim that the future project concerns the projection (the continuation) of a particular tradition. The ‘future’ of mankind, therefore, is not, as progressive philosophers of the Judaeo-Christian segmented time view imagine, a break or a ‘continuation’ of the past and tradition, but the past itself (more precisely ‘a’ past) projected into the future. The substance of history is nothing but the past, just as the essence of a historical project is tradition. This thesis can be illustrated. Assuming our epoch in Europe is experiencing the clash between two major historical and political projects (that of egalitarian humanitarianism: making Europe a zone of the global West governed by a multiracial consumer society; and that of ‘Ghibelline’ superhumanism: shaping Europe as an imperial model against the economistic civilisation), both movements, which aim to make different choices for Europe’s future, will naturally interpret Europe’s traditional past freely to support their projects. Some will seek to embed Europe in its Judaeo-Christian tradition, others in its pagan-Ghibelline tradition. And the entire past, mythological as well as artistic, literary, political, and religious, will then be reread through these two subjectivities, without ever speaking of ‘objective’ tradition.
When we speak of human historicity, of humans’ free capacity to ‘care only for themselves’, to make risky choices, and to project into the future — in the superhumanistic view, this does not apply to just any human or all humans. While every human can potentially reach active historical consciousness, in reality, very few do. Only those personalities (who stand in contrast to the ‘standard humans’) reach it who cast their contemporaries and successors into history without their cooperation. Humans generally remain within what Heidegger called ‘the they’1, rarely entering the asserting, supravital, and daring stage of the human ego. The assertion of the human ego, which underlies historical action and history, represents something unprecedented regarding the biosphere and life: a break with the natural laws of evolution, substituting the genetic programme with a cultural one. Technology, though it originates from the order of life rather than the order of history, ‘animates’ historical consciousness and its supravital nature from within.
The impact of technology on mass energy, living cells, or the genome, for example, grants human historical consciousness the ability to concretely replace life programmes (natural evolution or the course of the planets) with the designs of human will. Ultimately, however, it is historical consciousness, the will of the ego, that decides on the application of this technology and the utilisation of the associated possibilities to transcend the order of life. As Heidegger showed, most people (the ‘standard humans’ dominated by ‘the they’) are natural servants of technology and subject to its demands, but technology itself is employed, so to speak, by those personalities endowed with the will to deploy the human ego and its inherent enormous decision risk (the ‘choice’). Technology is not superhuman but is subjected to the superhuman.
(translated and annotated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)
Martin Heidegger’s concept of ‘the they’ (German: das Man) refers to the social norms and collective attitudes that shape individuals’ behaviours and thoughts, often leading to conformity and the loss of an authentic sense of self.