עברית My search and struggle for many years in the historical and social fields was dedicated to conceptualizing "the primal phenomena" of modern humanity and modern historical life. I needed it in order to find a foothold that would make it possible to navigate rationally in the dark forests of modern history, in which the paths are often so entangled and misleading.
Individuation and Reversal
Immense and detailed knowledge has been amassed through empirical historical research in the last century and a half. But this multiplying of information and detail, great and useful as it is, nevertheless, cannot hide the fact that our understandingof history lags far behind. As I tried to show in the chapter on the event in science, in this field we find current discoveries that energize our creative inventing and the generating of new concepts. In the field of history the situation is different. It is far poorer in supplying energizing nutrients. This requires from the researcher of the Event a greater reliance on his own forces. The reason for this specific situation is that our research, thinking and living in history, in the political and social fields, is still much more unconscious than in the others. This is caused by the fact that in history we are wholly submerged; we can hardly find a way to "get out" and view it from outside as external observers, as we do in natural science. Furthermore, here we are dealing with the human being and becoming in its entirety; while with science and philosophy we may at least believe that we are dealing only with this or that aspect of the human being. History reflects humanity's process of becoming as such. This is the main difficulty in the historical and social fields, which confront us when we strive to develop even the most rudimentary real concepts. In order to make our historical conception "worthy of the Event," we must, therefore, struggle to create new concepts to understand the creature that makes history, namely, the human being. Yet our understanding of ourselves lags far behind our understanding of so many specialized and limited fields; quite apart from the fact that the picture of ourselves, reflected back from history, the "who" we see when we gaze in its mirror, is still so very different from everything we know, or would like to know, about ourselves.
In this first introductory chapter on the event in history, I will try to create conceptual tools of operation as I did in the previous chapter. These tools must prove strong enough to deal with the real itself, or with "the present from the reality of the present." This can only take place inside the immanent pulse of real human life in history and social life today. But we are just beginning to realize consciously that we are beings of becoming, that we are this becoming. This is the meaning of modern history, after all, to become self-conscious as a mature humanity in the Milky Way. But this project is very recent, very young. Therefore, we are still largely living through it half consciously or unconsciously, in a deep historical sleep.
In Search of the Ur-Phenomenon of Modern History
My search and struggle for many years in the historical and social fields was dedicated to conceptualizing "the primal phenomena" of modern humanity and modern historical life. I needed it in order to find a foothold that would make it possible to navigate rationally in the dark forests of modern history, in which the paths are often so entangled and misleading. After many trials, I reached an evental historical location, the darkest of modern historical sites (which for me was also actualized as real Event when I was lost "in the middle of life, in the middle of life's dark wood," as Dante would have said). Here, after a time, I could build a forlorn and lonely, yet actually dependable and faithful creative home or starting point. It was there, in the moment when I was truly lost in history's darkest time, in which I found myself also in the middle of my individual lifetime’s journey, that I was able for the first time to transform and personalize the evental site of history and consciously merge it with my "life's middle." This operation became my individualized operative tool of evental research. I learned how to produce it and how to grasp and handle it with my own forces of life, with my own biography or “personal history.” The energy for its production was created by merging together two wounds: the wounded 20th century and my own wound. Then I had to train myself to control and channel the wound’s energy in order to forge from its pain, wonder, and mystery, a sword of effective differentiating and reversing difference. I had to learn to construct, individualize, and actualize it as my own life's primal or Ur-Phenomenon.
It was through using this special operative tool, that I could create an appropriate embryonic, seed-like concept, capturing the sense of the Ur- Phenomenon of modern history. This seed of operating force is therefore not an intellectual child of a thinking brain, but a real seed composed from the life forces of history's destructive wound and healing fountain. It is a healing power that becomes cognitive if you can capture it in the greatest proximity to the wound, because it is flowing out of modern history's wound and sickness. I gradually transformed and conceptualized it in order, eventually, to let it ripen until it could take the shape of the present concept of the primal phenomena of modern history. And this concept, in its present form, captures the relation between an idea or an ideal and its realization as the primal phenomena of modern history. This concept alone, so I believe, can bring together, both rationally and scientifically, the research of the history of modern ideas with the empirical research of real history, because it brings to light a unique modern difference that prevails between idea/ideal and realization. As we shall presently see, an observation of this difference between ideal and real shows, first, that there is a paradox, contrast or contradiction between them. Then, on closer inspection, we realize that they are really opposites of each other. The investigation of this contrast and opposition reveals, finally, that a process of reversal is taking place between them. This perception then gives birth to the concept of reversal as the Ur-Phenomenon of modern history as such.
Modern Individuation
It is largely accepted that only since the Renaissance have people begun to feel, recognize and identify themselves as having universal human values shared by all, and that in that era, mankind began to become conscious of itself as one humanity for the first time. Jacob Burckhardt formulated this thesis in 1860.
This means that the universal as such, variously referred to as God, Nature, or Idea, was grasped by the human individuality in a personal manner for the first time in history. The human individual also started to experience herself increasingly becoming emancipated and estranged from external religious and social authorities, and felt that what was formerly transcendental had now become immanent, inward, or even the essence of her human being. As proof of this thesis, historians point out that only as late as the end of the 18th century, did humans formulate for the first time (in America and France) a fully conscious declaration of universal human rights and values that were now placed above race, nation, gender, religion and socio-economic position. Together with such declarations, new political ideals were formulated at the same time that fraternity, equality, and liberty were conceived as the condition for a healthy social life. At the same time, natural science was established in its modern, universal form, using mathematics as an international human language to discover, formulate, and utilize "universal natural laws."
The strange thing is: the more humans become individualized, the more they desire to universalize. This paradox made itself visible with the discovery and practical realization of the universal both in social and political life and in the universal laws of nature. It is individual people that unearth, utilize, and realize the universal. This means, furthermore that the most universalized ideas and ideals become integrated into an emerging human freedom. The human begins to control these forces and make them her own; and the more each individual is emancipated from her external domain and hegemony, the more she strives to realize them in social life and natural science.
The most essential observation here is that what is individualized is precisely the universal. The human individuality feels and experiences herself as a universal human being, precisely by dint of experiencing herself as a private personality. We come to realize that it lies in the nature of the case of modernity itself that the universal is individualized in so many people on one hand, and that the individual is perceived as individual only because she is rooted in universals, on the other. But privatization of the universal and generalization of the individual means a mutual reversal for both. Universal force and power is put in the service of a personal,
private ego, and the same personal ego feels itself enlarged by this into universal dimensions. Transforming universal into individual means nothing less than individuation (or privatization) of the universal, which transforms and reverses the universal and makes it into a personal private possession. At the same time, the universalization of the individual allows the personal self, the ego, to expand its private egotism and make it universal egotism. Egotistic universality, on one hand, and universal egotism, on the other, merge together in this double reversal. In other words, modernity means exactly this: placing the content and force of the universal (God, Nature, or Idea) into the hands of the individual, private human personality, gives it increasingly powerful means to control, change, and realize this force in its economic, political, and cultural life and to use it in its research, utilization, and manipulation of nature. A private ego that controls the forces of God, Nature, or Idea, makes them its own, and uses them for its personal priorities in social life and in nature.
This means that since the private individual is emancipated from external divine and natural universal forces of form, order and meaning, she begins to internalize and control them herself. She becomes ever freer to use them as she wishes. And this is the reason that when we observe modern history and how universal ideas, human values, and natural laws and forces are realized in social life, we discover that they have been realized as their exact opposites. The French revolution is an archetypal case of all such reversals. It even seems that modern humanity was born to its new self-determination and has ever since consistently created, in all spheres of life, an exact reversal of everything it considers just, right and good, and natural. A careful investigation, therefore, of modern and contemporary history and civilization reveals a uniquely modern relation between human ideas and human historical reality, a relation of an exact reversal, which I believe to have discovered and justifiably termed the primal phenomena of modern history.
The dark wood of history becomes transparent on all sides when we observe this remarkable novelty at its center. The human becomes the site of this reversed becoming. The most powerful and universal force of reversing becomes individualized as the key operation in all fields of modern social, political and natural life. It immanently governs the new human constitution from the inside, nay, the human is becoming this constitution itself. It directs, as a constant reversing difference, all the processes of realization and implementation of our human values, ideas and ideals, as well as our social and political principles. Though this fact has obviously been noticed in historical research, it is constantly misinterpreted, because the real reason, cause, or "primal phenomena" governing it is not properly understood.
From chapter 2: The Event in History
The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art