My translation, rather provisional, of Armin
Mohler’s “Devant l’histoire: quelques remarques non-systématiques,” Nouvelle École 27–28 (1975). These few
brief theses bear the marks of Mohler’s “nominalism,” his term for his
rejection of the “eternally valid” in politics, and of his anti-systematic
thought. If you have any critical comments on this translation in particular (but any of my efforts), please do say. These are in part an exercise for me; I'm eager to improve.
The French original can be found at
And a PDF of this translation at
Regarding “nominalism” from Nietzsche to Mohler to Alain de
Benoist:
Of the man who attaches a special importance to history, we
wish to say that he feels ill at ease in the present and that he seeks to
return in his dreams to the epochs he prefers, and, for this reason, that he is
“conservative.” To describe this attitude, which today begins to look like an
epidemic, the term “nostalgia” has been coined. Nostalgia is a phenomenon with
multiple aspects and in light of these it’s not easy to cast judgment. But it
seems not to depend on fundamental intellectual attitudes. There are nostalgic
conservatives and conservatives who are not, while numberless non-conservatives
experience intense nostalgia. Anyhow, nostalgia is not a constitutive element
of conservatism; and that he is or isn’t nostalgic doesn’t permit one to say
that someone is or isn’t conservative.
1. History is Nearby
Most misunderstandings on the subject of history stem from
the fact that we consider it distant in time. Certainly history isn’t
immediately perceptible. But it bears no less on the present. We might conceive
our relationship with it according to the model of holography, which was
introduced in 1948 by Dennis Gabor. This is essentially a new sort of
“photography,” capable of rendering both the contours and the reverse of an
object, though our eye can only take its own perspective. The man without
historical sense is like one who sees himself in a mirror: he sees himself as
if rendered on a surface, with the distortions and omissions this entails. To
have historical sense means not to content oneself with only this dimension.
And—to stay with the image we’ve taken as an example—to survey history means to
hold a second mirror behind one’s head, or a whole system of mirrors, in order
to see oneself from all angles—and thus to achieve a distance with respect to
oneself.
2. History is not a Classroom
The profit one derives from history is generally of the
moral order. We laud the examples we might hope to equal. We claim that it
helps us to avoid the errors of others. And so on. Historians have spared no
jibe when it comes to these purported directly educative effects of history.
Successors of great men are generally few in number; and errors are rehearsed
tiresomely. If history does have an educative effect, it manifests itself less
directly, to say the least.
3. History Permits Verifiable Observation
History has a disciplinary power because its function is the
same as that of experimentation in the domain of natural sciences: history
offers the only possibility to effect verifiable observation at the human
level, just as experimentation offers it at the level of nature. This
observation is easier to make since philosophy demoted itself to a modest role
as the secretary at interdisciplinary meetings. Logic certainly has its
inductions, but only in the abstract. What we try to distinguish in the human
domain, such as “nature,” “soul” (Seele)
and “spirit” (Geist), are so
intimately entangled that logic is at pains to grasp it. What might I really
verifiably say about a thing, a person, a human event? I might say what it is,
what it will become with time and how it changes meanwhile. Over details there
may be differences of opinion: in broad terms, a consensus is possible.
4. Verifiability Isn’t Everything
Whoever comments on the severe limits of verifiable
observation generally exposes himself to the suspicion of wanting to devalue
all observation that advances. But it would be senseless to act in this way:
that would be to say that any attempt to return to the roots, any project grand
in scope should be reduced accordingly, and that the creative force in man
should be left to wither away. In the sphere of human action, history has a
particular function: “verifiability” signifies nothing else besides. And to
call that function “compensatory” would be to minimise it: for the experience
of history can have two contrary and radically opposite effects.
5. Through History We Experience the Complex
It would still be one of those inadmissible simplifications,
as with the issue of nostalgia, to say that the “conservative” experiences
history as an absurdity. Certain authors have used the metaphor of “the
in-significant” (“l’in-signifiant”) to
denote that thing that appears effectively across every historical event: to
wit, the fact of experience that history always represents an excess with respect to the
interpretative schemata we try to attribute to it in thought. The fundamental
experience according to which “the world is not divisible,” that is, that human
thought and reality can never coincide, attains in the historical dimension an
intensification which one might compare to a “stereo effect.” History is a
school of humility: all monocausal attempts at explication (or even bi- and
tricausal) break against it, and we are made aware of the complex character of
all reality. This needn’t necessarily disturb us, nor even discourage us—on the
contrary: in a manner difficult to define (and inexplicable in rational terms),
this can in fact urge us onto a deeper appreciation. By realising quite how
complex the world is, we live a kind of second birth.
6. Through History We Experience Form.
“To give a meaning to that which has no meaning” is equally
a formula we ought to mistrust. It belies a somewhat thin psychology. It’s true
that the world doesn’t make sense and that, as man cannot live without meaning,
okay, he constructs one. But the relationship that we must have with history is
even more essential. This “second birth” consists not only in the experience of
the world’s complexity—it resides as much in our impulse to set against the
complex (Benn or Montherlant would say “against chaos”) a form, a
configuration. What moves us profoundly in history is that man always seeks,
precisely on the grounds of this experience of a complex reality, and even in
the most desperate situations, still to leave a trace behind him. Even if it’s
only a matter of a scratch on so compact a reality—as Malraux said somewhere,
with that brilliant nonchalance he made his own.
7.
The man of Aufklärung
will say: “It isn’t much.” Our response can only be: “But it is.”
Thanks. I translated it to Spanish: https://nacionalismuasturianu.blogspot.com/2020/03/antes-de-la-historia-algunas-notas.html, with your kind permission.
ReplyDeleteGood to see. Thanks.
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