My translation of Guillaume Faye’s “Le choc des conceptions
du monde,” Vouloir 97–100
(January–March 1993). Faye was a political scientist associated for a time with Alain de Benoist and the semi-legendary nouvelle
droite. As this interesting essay shows, Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s rereadings
of the philosophical tradition made a great impression on his thought.
The original French text is available at Archives EROE:
A PDF of this version is available here:
The metaphysical thought that developed from monotheism and completed
itself in humanism wanted definitively to name being, to “know” it, and thereby
to determine values. Metaphysics, breaking with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy,
considered the being-of-the-world (l’être-du-monde)
as an asset, as a supreme value. It envisaged being as Sein (being-in-itself) and not as Wesen (being-in-becoming). The French word “être” (being) doesn’t have this double sense. To seek—and to
pretend to find—being as Sein (eînai in Greek) is to devalue it, is to
begin a “long march into nihilism.” The philosophy of spirit (Geist; Platonic noûs) overshadows the philosophy of life, of action, of creation, poíēsis. A whole anthropology follows:
for the world-conception (conception-du-monde)
of the metaphysical and humanist tradition, the human is a finished being,
since it participates in supreme values (God, notably, or “laws,” “grand moral
principles”) themselves complete, knowable, stable, universal. “There is no
longer any mystery in being,” says Heidegger. Confined to essences and
principles the human loses its mystery: humanism is just this. All possibility
of man’s surpassing the human must be abandoned. Human “values,” pronounced
once and for all, then run the risk of sclerosis or taboo.
Whence the distinction, noted throughout history, between
the values proclaimed with conviction by monotheist and humanist philosophies
and the behaviours to which they give rise. On the religious plane, the
confinement of human action to “laws” and the character, at once infinite and
finite, of the supreme God, which we know to be definitively omnipotent, tends
to transform the religious bond to an intellectual relation, to lógos, compromising in the long run the
power of myth. Spinoza, Leibniz, Pascal and Descartes offer examples of this
transformation of religious metaphysics into logic; one must recall Spinoza’s amor intellectualis dei, Leibniz’s
deduction of God’s attributes, the intelligibility of God by all reason
affirmed by Descartes or, heading a little further into religious nihilism,
Pascal’s mercantile paradigm of betting on the divine. Bernard-Henri Lévy was
quite right to jointly proclaim his Bible-belief (biblisme) and his atheism in Le
testament de Dieu, to declare himself faithful to the Hebrew metaphysical
religion, crucible of other monotheisms, the first to have formulated the
preference for lógos over mûthos.
Perpetual Interrogator
Conversely, the Greek tradition which begins with
Anaximander of Samos and Heraclitus, and which snakes as an implicit
world-conception throughout European history up to Nietzsche, refuses to name
being. This last is conceived as Wesen (being-in-becoming),
as gígnesthai (birth; transforming
becoming), but is never defined. The Greek word for “truth,” Heidegger informs
us, is alḗtheia, which means
“incomplete unveiling.” Truth is not that of biblical Yahweh, “I am the One, I
am the Truth.” Truth is that which the human will illumines, that will which
lifts the world’s veil without ever bringing the same reality to light.
In Greek philosophy, as in Heidegger, innumerable terms are
used for “thinking being.” We can never answer the question of being, as we can
never grasp “the river’s essence,” always changing, flowing under the bridge.
The world in its being-in-becoming remains always “the Obscure,” and man, a
perpetual interrogator, an animal in constant search of “enlightenment.” Hominity
(l’hominité), Heidegger tells us, is
characterised by deinótaton,
“disquiet”: to disquiet the world is to question it eternally, to remove it and
to remove oneself from quietude, that illusion of knowing where we are and
where we go.
This world-conception represents man, perpetual giver of
sense, in combat with the world, which shrinks from his assaults and which
requires, to let itself be partially arraigned, always new forms of human
action, new sense, new values which will be transgressed in their turn.
The Sacred and Openness-to-the-world
Greek mythology, which offers us the spectacle of combat
between inconstant gods and never disheartened human warriors, always burning
with a passion to break divine laws to preserve their life or the laws of their
community, represents the dawn of this European world-conception. An end to
history through reconciliation with the metaphysical divine, at last
understood, is deeply alien to it. Only this world-conception permits one to
envisage the foundation of a superhumanism: man, passing from historical value-cycles
to historical value-cycles, transforms at each epochal step the nature of his
will-to-power according to the process of the Eternal Return of the Identical.
The cosmos remains a mystery; it is “the obscure in perpetual unveiling” as, in
a singularly currant way, modern physics also sees it. Myth remains present at
the world’s heart; this willed and accepted impossibility to know and name the
being-of-the-world lends this last an adventurous and risky character, and in
human action the tragic and solitary aspect of an eternally unfinished combat.
The sacred, in the strongest sense, may thus arise in the world: it lives in
this distance between human will and the world’s “evasion,” clearly visible
furthermore through modern scientific and technological enterprise. The sacred
is not kept to a principle (moral or divine) or to a substantial attribute of
being (a god), but it lives in the fact of man, of the world. The sacred appears
in a sense given by man to his surroundings: the world, Hölderlin tells us, is experienced
as a “sacred night.” There is no more need to reassure oneself by searching for
“the essence of being” in preparation for the end of history, since the man of
this Greek world-conception desires disquiet. He thus takes himself to be fully
human, that is, always marching towards the superhuman, since he conforms to
his openness-to-the-world (the Weltoffenheit
of which Arnold Gehlen speaks), written into his physiology and proven by
modern biology.
The search for being as Sein,
the quest for the metaphysical and moral absolute, might then be seen as an
inhuman exercise, and the humanism which follows philosophically as a properly
nonhuman ideology, or, more precisely, unhealthy. It’s in historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) and worldliness (Weltlichkeit), which the Greeks called tò ón (being, present participle) and
the Romans existentia, that the path
lies, which we might choose to follow or not to follow.
To follow it, to plunge into the Holzweg, the woodcutter’s trail that leads “nowhere” if not “to the
heart of the sacred forest,” as Heidegger mysteriously tells us: here is what
rekindles the dawn of Greece: retrieve the thread cut by Christianity and “remove
it from oblivion.” The trail leads not to a town, where the merchants repose
but, disquietingly, plunges into adventure. “Adventure,” that is the coming of
that which, at the path’s turn, “arises from the future”: history.
Here then is the fundamental meaning of Nietzsche’s
enterprise, thus Heidegger’s, and no doubt many more after him: to reinstall,
in Europe, in the technological epoch, that world-conception incompletely
formulated, unfinished by certain Greeks, but to do it in a different form,
self-conscious somehow, in the knowledge that even this work is to be begun
again. We men of the evening, of Hesperia (Abendland)
(in relation to that Greece of pre-Socratics that would be the dawn of a
world-concept), a task awaits us with nothing of the philosophical, in the
intellectual sense of the term, about it: to make self-conscious, in the heart
of the Europe of technological civilisation, a transfigured form of this
world-conception, or of this world-religion (religion-du-monde) of the Greek dawn, pulled from oblivion by
Nietzsche and Heidegger.
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