Amongst the entrants a tumultuous year ushers in, standing to the side are those who cast at least an eye towards pasts into which their minds may be tempted to abscond. Possibly they will take the hint, step back, and reflect a little about this penchant of theirs. Even when it mainly amounts to a variety of daydreaming. While with those for whom the past does count as prologue, disquietingly and/or delightfully, or are historical genealogists at heart who seek to trace the lineages of the present back to a set of formative elements, descriptively, dispassionately, and omit to draw from the retelling any lesson (yet precisely by this intimating there might be one after all) – in either case the result of their efforts may prove better, later on, were they to ask themselves what the excursions into earlier times signify.
Where the daydreamers stand, is a point here and now, and wish as they might to be always on the way home (immer nach Hause), boldness for an indefinite journey does not come. Their backwards-turned glance the prospect of times immeasurable (die Unermeßlichkeit der Zeiten) in great unending pastness, may have scared off. Yearning to catch the most sweeping histories compressed into tiny brilliant minutes (die weitesten Geschichten in kleine glänzende Minuten zusammen gezogen), did little to prevent it. Atmospheric effects eyed as distances themselves pass fleetingly into range, yielding obscure gleams they delight in, whatever they peer at invested with a halo of milky flickerings (milchfarbne Schimmer),* does hardly any more. So entrancing the magnetism of the preterite is not.
* Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, pt. ii
Thus does an unspoken reluctance to embark, to ply against time’s current (as time usually is thought to flow) backwards into the past, preside over them at the outset; almost immediately it becomes the principle of their endeavours, such as they are, effecting deferrals and postponements, always one after another: soon it appears in yet a further guise, as though all along it had been meant to explain why they never cease not to do that which they claim to want, in fulsome reply to a query what their efforts or non-efforts could possibly betoken. – These, they may fear, if launched would vanish amidst the dust-clouds of our barren histories of culture, which mostly resemble a collation of variant readings accompanied by a running commentary on a classic text that is missing (unsere dürftigen Kulturgeschichten, die meistens einer mit fortlaufendem Kommentar begleiteten Variantensammlung, wozu der klassische Text verlohren ging, gleichen).* Not so aberrant a hesitation, in fact. Were it judged with due impartiality, perhaps one might admit that such an attitude does have its reasons. – Though what else really should one expect from some who delight themselves by making jokes upon jokes? (E. g.: “Mit der Ironie ist durchaus nicht zu scherzen.”) – Even so, what an odd display of inaction! Viewed from without, this standstill seems to dally ironically with the incomprehensible.**
* Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragmente”
** vide Schlegel, “Ueber die Unverständlichkeit”
Readier to think about the significance of a turn towards the past, could be those who pursue it as a consummate pastime. Surely, for the more energetic amongst them, history is the ultimate form of tourism.* Itineraries for their travels into the past (if not also for the return out) have to be planned, and needed for this is a higher degree of selectivity regarding the sights they wish to visit. And indeed, concentration of mind. Compression, in this case, describes their own active effort, rather than, as in the other, designating the intrinsic density of what would result, the small tales within which (as though each could be a monad) entire histories were compacted. However, to the extent that these voyageurs into history comport themselves like tourists, one should not be so quick to attribute much seriousness of purpose to them. Flitting through too many minds are the scenes of tour-groups with more cameras and smartphones than human participants, who hardly take thought for the sights they purportedly went to see, other than as backdrops for photographs of themselves they probably will never actually revisit: the whole thing being little more than an exercise in crossing off items on a list, or an outing to accrue a semblance of prestige. With real curiosity such sad episodes of tourism have very little in common; with modes of activity which do actually care for the things encountered, still less. So the venturesome should exercise caution before departing into history on any kind of tour; carelessness is not as simple to bypass as those travellers would wish, wasting their time is easier than they might think, abroad in that country called the past. – As a prophylaxis, those who embark on a visit to history could opt to look mainly where most observers do not ever really happen to glance, their eyes fixed instead by what is more conspicuous or even peculiar, all those things silly people call “curiosities” (tout ce que les sots appellent des curiosités). Such rather more fastidious sight-seers, “historians” in the ancient sense of the word, might witness things others have not often noted, more rightly finding them to be curious (curieux), musing that they do in fact care whether they are seen, even call for it, though usually the soft pleas go unheard. But if they land on ready ears, how ever infrequently, what might not be relayed about their parts of the past by these thousand curious details (mille détails curieux),** each alluding to the rest from another little angle! Every one a corner or alley where few tourists gather. Neglected passages and portals – no mere metaphors, if the past as a locus of inquiries comprises a maze of pathways, in which historiography would lose its way entirely did an implicit hodology not help from within to guide it.*** A better sense of direction should be honed through such historical tours themselves, when an itinerary is devised with finesse, attuned to small discoveries made while afoot, those strange things that transpire in the street which no local seems to notice (ce qui se passe dans la rue et qui ne semble curieux à aucun homme du pays). Whereas for this visitor, the evident disinterest is a frame around a most interesting picture, and even one part of the scene itself. Such a curiosité exemplifies the sort of item he went to see at first hand: it shows how someone by his small items of routine does with signal understatement ignore the society through which he moves. By them he can insulate himself from the relations amongst people where allies and enemies will be sought, which otherwise could fasten on him. That social nexus, without which society would be but an empty word, he tacitly avoids. So, where better may a perspicuous tourist witness his deft evasion, than in the many streets of history? Bygone routes are fit settings to observe his kind, each a mobile island in an unseen archipelago, all of them repelling the society’s attentions by antithetic reprise of its devices, their social or rather antisocial ways (les habitudes sociales, ou plutôt antisociales).**** Quite an edifying anti-spectacle, for the more selective of historical travellers! These do embark to escape their societies, and if intending at all to return, they may come with a few felicitous antidotes to society in general.
* David Starkey, “History and I” ** Stendhal, Mémoires d’un touriste, vol. ii, “Marseille, le 13 juillet 1837”
*** regarding “l’espace hodologique,” see Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant, pt. iii, ch. ii, i,
and “hodologischer Raum,” Kurt Lewin, “Der Richtungsbegriff in der Psychologie”
**** Stendhal, op. cit.
Visit history – and then? Of all these travellers, perhaps the historical flâneurs will give the most plausible answer. After all, in the presence of cities it is they who are adepts of the detour, while to what may the dimension of the bygone be likened, if not a maze of byways? These older zones and these passers-by go together. Afoot in the regions of the past, well-tuned aimlessness does alert them how the routes they take and do not take actually consist, yet without construing the pathways as a whole. All the less inclined for it would they be, as there too the alterations come rapidly, and indeed consequent on the flânerie itself. History’s various hodological spaces much like the city’s do change their configurations in the blink of an eye. These fields of the past are a country wherein what seems passable one moment, thickens into contrariety the next. Fixity as such yields reversals. No item remains stationary. An avenue extending invitingly before the historical flâneur, reverses its direction and advances against him. What looked far off, moves closer, or the reverse. Where nearness itself beckoned, distance comes to be, and vice versa. A slope to climb towards a sought-for datum, alters into an abrupt slide downwards to some other quite different thing. Limits that were the most solid, perversely melt away. And examples of such changes multiply disconcertingly, upon even minor shifts in position and/or perspective. So too may it happen with the curiosités these fewer tourists do note while abroad in history. They tend likewise towards fleeing. All the more vital then to recall the fugitive encounters when the travellers alight back in the present, for henceforth if not earlier its arrangements are also unfixed. A mistake to ignore it; thus those voyages could refresh their sense of the locales to which they return. “Today” for them is now an inexact word. Theirs, and indeed all “the present times” they may instead want to regard as space – sub specie viarum.
Touring through history should harbour its own raison d’être. And yet, especially if those regions are described by the historians’ more sensitive counterparts, namely, poets, novelists, filmic auteurs, the handful who notice how (as has been said) the past is not dead nor even past, there may come a finer sense of the meaning and the function of social habits, in their typical condition or when denatured and applied extraordinarily as a shield against the society itself. Items of such a kind thus extruded from their contexts, the social factors could better be distinguished from the realities of politics, a difference which is of some importance to recognise, whether a formal analysis is the aim or only an informal notion of these matters.
Presently (if that word still is serviceable) the political outlook is especially dire in Western European countries, as a result of what often has the look of an organised experiment meant to ascertain how far the existing peoples will acquiesce before the advance to dominance of groups that comport themselves as races. Openly in the streets and more secretively elsewhere, cohorts both native and imported now numbering in the millions, the fanatics of an Islamic supremacy whose eventual debut would also mark the birth of a new race, or, in different phraseology, ratify the ascendance of one previously inchoate: that is the first of them. The other’s native environs are the halls of official and semi-official power in Brussels and like places, where the upper ranks of politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators, forming in themselves such a heterogenous collective, fancy that they stand over everyone else in the European Union, the United Kingdom, etc., and beyond as a race, one aggrieved by the presentiment that time and circumstance are not on its side and on this account something like an aggressive breed of dwarves, but still a race. – Granted, identifying these two formations as “races” may seem shocking or strange, and earlier I myself hesitated to “say what is” in regard to the phenomena of politics that term more and more appeared the best suited to explicate; yet then the conduct of those separate groups did answer the greater part of my doubts on this score, and so I began to apply it. But these remarks are parenthetical. – What concerns me at present is the extent of resistance to those two would-be races by their targets, the extant peoples of Western Europe in particular, and the degree of comity amongst the latter. Yet to assess such political variables may be a challenge, varying as each appears to do not least in accordance with the vantage-points from which it is discerned. Within this field as in most others, the observers as well are always underway towards their goals, thus tending to locate themselves at every moment so that for the most part all see that which they want to see or already know, and hear that which they want to hear or already understand, also when recollection or anticipation has a share in the bias. Well, if all that is the case, and in this instance it seems probable, given how divergent are the assessments put forward by commentators whose intelligence generally one does esteem, then any of the conjectures that would issue from them really ought not to be spun very far.
There have been signs during the last months that the resistance is intensifying, the comity improving, in several countries where conditions have worsened the most, in Western Europe. Whether the scene is insular or continental, opposition to the twined perils of caliphate and super-state attains a better clarity about these enemies and their aims, while awareness of comparable extremity in the countries nearby may beget a new liking between them. All of which, as per an unadorned view of things as they now stand in these regions and imminent upheavals that are likely, comes together to abet the pre-revolutionary conditions now prevailing.* – Seen from another angle, however, the current moment shows more and more openly how far gone the Western Europe countries are, how inclined to bedeck their own subjugation by the low art of bowing. From this perspective, the many incidents since October 7, 2023 formed a circus where the attendees never went really to be distracted, but rather to garner some self-serving excuses for their own lassitude: all professionally stage-managed by the official and semi-official media, and co-ordinated down to the details by their counterparts amongst the so-called non-governmental organisations (proxies whose mendacity begins from the term itself). Such complicities by now routine in Western Europe, the contrasts with the response to the uprising in Iran are marked. Opposition to the next political régime must not grow: so think the authorities. Nor should the rest of the sedated populace there be given any revolutionary ideas (man will die sedierte EU-Bevölkerung nicht auf revolutionäre Gedanken bringen). Consequently, journalism is countermanded to the point that in Western Europe there are nearly no reports on the courageous Iranian insurrection (dass in West-Europa so gut wie gar nicht über den mutigen Aufstand im Iran berichtet wird).** – Both of these readings of the overall situation currently seem plausible. Considering how mutable it all has proven to be recently, how open to unexpected developments, one does well to hesitate before venturing any prediction where everything will go from this point onwards (hodologically, kinetically, polemically). Better indeed to refrain from forecasting when the thing anticipated is some kind of revolution, an event about which no one honestly does know in advance whether it will come at all or what structure it might have if it did (ob sie überhaupt kommen und schon gar nicht, welche Struktur sie haben wird), nor even very much pertaining to the circumstances that may portend it (if any really do). Tempted though one well might be to disregard this caution at the very point when – as in Iran now – a momentous revolution appears to be breaking out, it is at such a juncture that one should most scrupulously heed the as it were methodological reservation. Expectations when dashed may injure someone who had held them too tightly, and others too. Better then to think that a revolutionary prelude need not lead to anything (es braucht zu überhaupt nichts zu führen).*** Which even might be, under the circumstances, the least bad of likely outcomes. Observers who know something of history will not find it hard to imagine worse ones, sadly. Visitors to less fortunate spots amongst history’s urban avenues may remember popular uprisings of the kind which came so fast up the boulevard that it outstripped its own heralding.**** Instances of this precipitous error are not few. One way or another, each failed to arrive at the right time. What led them? Hope.
* Mark Steyn, “Partying on the Precipice (cont)”
** Tatjana Festerling, “Paul Weston wie immer auf den Punkt”
*** Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”
**** William Faulkner, A Fable, “Wednesday”
Hope against hope is sometimes no mere phrase. Likewise with the negative of the thing. Thus at times there really ought to be despair at despair. Both those postures could turn anyone’s focus away from the present (or how ever else one terms the sector) and the present’s major questions. – Upheaval as now in Iran results from the concerted action of people who do not attach their trust or distrust primarily to occurrences which might be imminent, nor grant any provisional last word to that zone of time. Rather more clear is how they are intent on the nearest things; and if in fact that is so, neither hope nor despair has any great share in the motivation of their resistance. Deeds like these show concentration and present-mindedness, and this tangible quality, I surmise, itself draws interest and sympathy even from afar. Moreover, from a distance it works to vivify public opinion elsewhere, by force of example, encouraging it implicitly to focus (or to awaken), to exert and to improve itself. Effects of encouragement vibrate beyond its concern with the Iranians’ fight against the régime; there is also a surplus yield of energy, capable of application in other areas. Presence of mind, noted in action on this scale, stirs up an intellectual exhilaration; they who feel it seek avenues along which to participate vicariously; more than the role of witness it is the active experiencing which appeals to them. So, much like some revolutionaries in medias res, “fellow travellers” elsewhere also find it to be more agreeable and rewarding to gain “experience and expertise in revolutions” than to write about them (пріятнѣе и полезнѣе „опытъ революціи“ продѣлывать, чѣмъ о немъ писать).* Although these observers cannot so readily be likened to tourists, some fewer now also cross paths with curiosités that most do overlook, and remark how curious this neglect itself is; later considering what it signifies, though cautiously, carefully, as the points are delicate. Similarly they hear the objective ironies in the situation and even the accidental humour of it, where others unwittingly fail to note these tones; afterwards, perhaps in an ironic mood of their own, opportunity might come for understanding why that was so. – Right now, however, present-mindedness is the thing. A conspicuous quality, abroad it draws people’s notice and moves them to participate from a distance, as actively as they are able, in the country’s experience of revolution. And this preference for as direct a part as can be taken, one should include while sorting out and evaluating what they happen to write concurrently with the experience; especially because, everything going so rapidly, the gaps and vagaries of the communication channels often heighten a sense of frustration. As regards that assessment, a better idea of how it is to be done could lay ready at hand if one also prioritises the experiences themselves. Which, I admit, has been my own tendency during these last days, as the uprising escalates to put the tyranny into existential peril. Writing about it all, seems to miss the point, even harbouring a distraction from events, an alternative as misguided/misguiding in its way as hope or despair can sometimes be in theirs.
* Владимиръ Ленинъ, Государство и революція, Послѣсловіе
Witnessing with rapt sympathy, even an intelligent enthusiasm, as the events take their course, wherever they are to lead, and expressing support for the revolution (a term it already seems to merit) by a public declaration that might in some cases put oneself at risk, attests to a greater presence of mind which the bravery of the revolutionaries does, in a word, communicate. All these matters of the hour grip it, them, us. And yet for those who still have a head for history this episode may bring back a memory (not that it is needed or desired at such a juncture like the present), as a possible comparison: namely, the response of many contemporaries amongst European publics then to the Revolution of 1789 in France. Not ten years later the wide acclamations which greeted the event were distilled by a most perspicuous observer, who had known the sentiments intimately at first hand. Appreciatively he wrote of those spectators’ mode of thinking (die Denkungsart der Zuschauer) in the first flush of excitement, when showing itself openly and publicly (öffentlich) it bespoke so universal and yet disinterested a participation (eine so allgemeine und doch uneigennützige Theilnehmung), one which could redound to their detriment or imperil them, as to demonstrate, and not merely to those such as he who in turn observed the scene, how at least a moral penchant inheres in all human nature. As such that demonstration was an advance towards improvement (das Fortschreiten zum Besseren): indicating that moments of progress are possible. Now, if this proof does foreshadow any philosophy of history at all, its edifice would be modest; but the issue is not germane here. In fact that Fortschreiten remains sufficient in itself: that it has been, was enough. It too need not have led to anything. – Although the temptation to extend it by sequelæ, grew in history’s laboratory. – For, supposing if that revolution of an ingenious people (Revolution eines geistreichen Volks) could somehow be undertaken a second time, with all its disasters, terror, waste of spirit and life, a sensible person never would decide to try the experiment at such expense (das Experiment auf solche Kosten zu machen nie beschließen würde). Not a full decade later, nor yet even quite having ended, and already there could be espied some impulses to repeat the experience! – whether they would act for comparative purposes in order to gather some kind of knowledge theoretically or practically, or for an opportunity to resume or stage over again the drama of it, became problems during the next centuries; at this threshold they matter little. Against all such aims the event by its uniqueness itself seemed to warn: in that contemporary observer’s judgement at least. But what did the sympathy it aroused exemplify instead? The answer, so I infer, is present-mindedness, shared by both the revolutionaries and their audience. Common to them all was the present moment; while what it is and where its limits are, were for him the questions. Not the weighty deeds or misdeeds of individuals (wichtige, von Menschen verrichteten Thaten oder Unthaten), nor the results if things deemed great amongst men are made small, the small, made great (was groß war, unter Menschen klein, oder, was klein war, groß gemacht wird), nor even whenever it happens, just as if by magic, that old and splendid institutions of the state disappear and others arise in their place, as though out of the depths of the earth (wie, gleich als durch Zauberey, alte glänzende Staatsgebäude verschwinden, und andere an deren Statt, wie aus den Tiefen der Erde, hervorkommen), worthy as such topics might otherwise be, did then and there concern the philosophical spectator he was. No, nothing like that at all (nein: nichts von allem dem), he said, is exemplary, but the participation verging nearly on enthusiasm (Theilnehmung, die nahe an Enthusiasm grenzt), that is, applying other words without qualms, the present-mindedness from which some present moment never strays far. And for him too their shared “today,” to vary the term again just slightly, did remain close by, as is suggested when he writes with full concentration about the matters of our times (unserer Zeit), the affairs in our days (in unseren Tagen), or the potentials evident in human nature for now (für jetzt).* Yes, some might prefer to read these phrases as façons de parler, prominently featured, amongst the few rhetorical ornaments of which this most sober author permitted himself the use; but I take them to be insignia of an idea for which he cared greatly. How pleased must he have been to observe this idea becoming a force with the French Revolution, taking shape as a common present in Europe. Why then would he not memorialise so new an event?
* Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Facultäten, Zweyter Abschnitt,
“Erneuerte Frage: Ob das menschliche Geschlecht
im beständigen Fortschreiten zum Besseren sey,” 6
Notable albeit brief, the commonality fostered amongst the European nations and peoples those fleeting, fragile things, the ties of comity that are or ought to be, in a word, ends in themselves, beyond whatever else each may and may not promise.