The Three-Dimensionality of Historical Time

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye examines the three-dimensional concept of time, highlighting its impact on human historical identity and its contrast with Christian progressivism.

This is the tenth part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.

What fundamentally characterises the superhumanist worldview, as formulated and brought to light by Wagner, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in its full historical potential, is the replacement of the Indo-Christian linear concept of time with a three-dimensional one, and the return of this three-dimensionality to humanity, which grounds its existence as such. This three-dimensional temporality enables humans to emerge as historical beings. How is this three-dimensional perspective of time and history to be defined, and how does it conflict with the progressive, Christian-derived view? In response, we would like to summarise Giorgio Locchi’s thesis.

By ‘killing’ the past, by denying it any legitimacy to occupy the present, by structuring time according to the segmental scheme (completed, forgotten, or petrified past — present as a ‘blank’ zero point — future as salvation and end of history, abolition of history, and thereby what constituted the past), Judaeo-Christian progressivism implicitly erases the presence of tradition, identity, and the will to continue historically. Reactionary traditionalism, incidentally, is part of this strategy. From the moment the works and events of the past are declared obsolete and null, they can be embalmed, honoured, and studied like fossils. The past is more petrified by a technological safeguard as it is neutralised and rendered non-active. In art, the works of the past peoples are presented as the ‘heritage of humanity’ to demonstrate that they no longer have any relevance or resonance in the present. As soon as historical research, due to the strong memories it evokes, threatens to exert influence again, it is promptly declared strictly scientific: thus, Georges Dumézil’s Indo-European research became the subject of an eager neutralisation campaign, which even elicited explanations from the researcher that his work on the Indo-Europeans had no implications for the present — that the three-part ideology of the Indo-Europeans had only academic significance, in short, that the Indo-European past of Europe, which could give it a unified historical memory, was either concluded or phantasmagorical. Turning the Indo-Europeans into an object of mere scholarship appears much more effective than polemically denying their existence as a people — as also happens — since the latter strategy ends up reactivating their presence.

We must contrast the past of the linear conception of time (past in Heidegger’s terminology) with the past of three-dimensional time, which Heidegger refers to as having-been-ness. One builds the future not on the ‘past’ but on the ‘having-been-ness’, that is, on what contains the arché, the founding beginning. One builds the future not on determinism (either that of the progressives, who are handled by the supposed direction of history, or that of the reactionary traditionalists, who are trapped in adherence to a closed and compelling tradition) but on fidelity to a project of destiny, voluntarily chosen. And what does one choose? One chooses to be historically founding, what can be located not only in the present but also in the past and future, namely one’s heroes. History, in its authentic sense, is the choice of heroes.

Between Abraham and Achilles, the alternative is now evident. It is through the choice of heroes (even more than through biological and cultural conditions) that one recognises what must be called a ‘people’. Wagner, by the way, gave a definition of the concept of people that fully aligns with our view. For him, the members of the same people were those who, living in the same present need, remember together the ‘fathers’ they chose and also formulate a similarly common future project. The past is then no longer what is abolished and forever lost but what has ‘become’ and asserts its presence here and now, indeed what will be, what continues and does not cease to become, as the historical future is to embrace the becoming of the past. In this view, the entire time (past, present, and future) in a triple osmosis is the same becoming, the same event. The present of the people is no longer that zero point, that empty moment of the asymptotic segment leading to the end of history, but presence, enduring presence (being-present in Heidegger’s terms). This presence in one’s own history and within the historical three-dimensionality of time is found again in the Greek verb einai, which means ‘to be present in duration’. Duration, however, also includes space, i.e., the homeland. The present of the three-dimensional conception of time means not only that the people possess their own history but also that they are rooted in their space, which is an additional reason for the prevailing cosmopolitan mentality to reject this conception of time and prefer the linear one. The concept of ‘presence’ indicates that the present of the three-dimensional time includes not only the always active historical memory but also, in its continuity, the territory of the ancestors, the land where the people have begun and continue their history.

This three-dimensional conception of history is neither ‘revolutionary’ nor ‘cyclical’, nor ‘reactionary’, nor ‘progressive’. It includes and transcends these categories simultaneously. Where tradition and modernism were considered oppositional, they are here regarded as harmonising. Such a viewpoint is akin to that of the German Conservative Revolution, whose view of history was opposed both to progressivism and reactionary traditionalism. Taking a revolutionary-conservative stance means simultaneously enacting a return to origins and self-projection into the future, signifying a will to rediscover the beginning (Heidegger’s ‘Greek beginning’) and to rehabilitate it, transformed, in the future, in a process Nietzsche called ‘the eternal return of the same’. Naturally, such a perspective is completely incomprehensible to all those who are exposed to the linear, eschatological, and messianic conception of time — to the adherents of Judaeo-Christian progressivism.

We can also describe this perspective as Faustian — with reference to the significance of Goethe’s dramatic figure: the Faustian man is ‘risked’ (and Heidegger defines the human condition as the highest risk for oneself and the world); he is, so to speak, ‘damned’ by his gods, whom he boldly and defiantly challenges. The Faustian man is, in this sense, de-installed. Incidentally, one can only be considered de-installed if deeply rooted. Both concepts complement each other entirely. When Europe began to conquer the seas and other continents (de-installation) from the 16th century onwards, it did so as Europe and from a rooted position. The European rootedness contributed to the power and intensity of the movement of conquest and discovery, just as the latter strengthened Europe’s personality. It was the universalist ideology of Christianity that accelerated Europe’s depersonalisation, not its Faustian and conquering de-installation. The Faustian and de-installed nature of the European collective personality gives European identity the form of a constant reconquest. Every de-installation movement necessitates a new rootedness, giving Europe’s (cultural, political, etc.) identity the form of a constant tension, an always risky and fruitful transformation.

To better define the Faustian nature of the historical personality of Europe, we must go beyond the actual framework of the European human and precisely determine in what way humanity itself is a ‘historical being’.

Biologically programmed animals know but do not understand. They cannot deviate from their programming. The world presents itself to them as complete, ready for application. Humans, on the other hand, whose innate impulses are de-programmed, characterised by ‘openness to the world’ and malleability, essentially possess little knowledge but are created for understanding, which underlies technology.

Heidegger recognised that humans are always in a ‘state of mind’ towards themselves and the world, a state perpetually problematic for them but relentlessly driving them to act against themselves and their environment. While the animal is set in the world, in a state of security and ‘normalcy’ (which ensures its unity with the world of which it is the recipient), humans are thrown into the world (Geworfenheit in Heidegger’s terminology).

While the animal is oriented towards the species, inhabited and governed by the unconscious diligence of its genes, lacking self-consciousness, humans, upon reaching historical consciousness, are oriented towards themselves (as a people, not as individuals), are ‘called’ to themselves by what Heidegger calls the event, that is, the temptation to transform themselves into an ‘event’ for the world, a risky and disruptive event. Defined as ‘being-in-the-world’, humans must, therefore, be understood as living beings who, unlike animals, live for their own sake. They are there to become themselves, to shape themselves, to care for themselves. ‘Themselves’ can, of course, mean the community, the tribe, the people, and not only ‘humanity’ or the ‘individual’. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (being-there) means that the ‘world’ exists only for humans. Without humans, there is no world. But what does this concept ‘world’ mean? The animal world does not exist ‘for’ the animal; it is merely a complex of physicochemical signals, to which the animal responds in its eternal co-presence with its environment, in its constant immediacy. The human world is more than that: it is subject to historical existence. What constitutes the historical human as a historical animal is somewhat trivially put — his egoism, the fact that he appropriates the world and interprets it as ‘created for him’, as a space outside himself that he can use to care for himself. For humans, the world thus does not represent the objective totality of beings, the entirety of the physicochemical world.

By denying peoples this ‘self-care’, by paralysing the assertion of their collective ego, Judaeo-Christian humanitarianism regresses to the animal level of species consciousness. The species is here understood with the primitive and confusing category of ‘humanity’, a purely zoological concept devoid of any historical value and thereby paradoxically inhuman. Egalitarianism generally rejects the notion of humanity as a person or as a people and instead considers it only under the zoological criteria of the ‘mass of humanity’ and its correlate: the individual. Superhumanism, as implicitly formulated by the pagan tradition and articulated by Nietzsche’s thought, asserts, on the other hand, that humans act from within themselves and not through the species, that is, ‘humanity’. They act ‘from within themselves’, not as atomised individuals but as a people or as a creative person who expresses the soul and destiny of his people.

The individualism of the egalitarian-humanitarian consciousness must not be confused with the ‘personalism’ we refer to; it points rather to the magma of the species, that is, to a humanity that only represents the addition of innumerable ‘equal’ individuals. This regressive view of the human is expressed in the Judaeo-Christian philosophy of ‘human rights’. Here, humans are only considered as human beings (following the terrible Anglo-Saxon formulation), that is, fundamentally as ‘human zoological beings’, as mammals of the homo type.

Just as it seems natural that all animals of the same species are equal and have the same ‘rights’, Judaeo-Christian zoologism considers it natural that all humans are equal. The concept of the mass man (Christianity and Occidentalism) and the idea of humans as autonomous individuals are related in that they both reject historical consciousness and reduce humanity to the unthinking level of the species, subject to the determinism of theological or ecological development, depending on the doctrine. However, just as one can choose between different historical options and various forms of the past or future, one can also choose whether to accept or reject the historicity inherent in human beings.

What characterises historical consciousness, human temporality, and what completely escapes animals, as well as declining civilisations, is humanity’s will to endure, which Heidegger called Jemeinigkeit (Mineness). With this will, humans as historical beings care for themselves (see Heidegger’s Sorge, related to the Latin cura) without simply following the programme of their species.

This ‘self-care’, peculiar to historical consciousness, moves humans to project themselves into the future by anticipating themselves and interpreting the present they live as ‘already past’. In historical consciousness, which cannot be linear but only three-dimensional (since past and future, the only real aspects, merge into the simple content represented by the present moment), humans achieve a unique ‘self-presence’, as it surpasses the mere immediate consciousness of existing here and now, which is inherent to the animal and the anti-historical civilisations of the contemporary West.

The self-presence of the historical human, the historical ego, contains a depth and multidimensional intensity that leads to the assertion that Western civilisation (dominated by the ambition to build the mass man in the happiness of an eternal present) is comparatively creating a type of lower, more zoological human because it lacks this temporal intensity of self-presence that characterises historical consciousness.

The human world encompasses all relationships that arise in humanity’s interest and in its will to power. These relationships are potential: humans continually redefine themselves as beings capable of action. Since humans are ‘abandoned’ and ‘thrown’ into the world, they must accept themselves as egos, take care of themselves, and accordingly change and ‘cultivate’ the world. At every moment, they face choices and are repeatedly called to decide and act in the face of alternatives because the world appears to them as a complex of interrelationships, a constant inter-communication (Heidegger’s Mitsein [togetherness]).

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)