Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Hitler and the Germans

Titel: Hitler and the Germans

Stichwort: Gegenwart (Präsenz): 2 Bedeutungen; Plato (politische Wissenschaft): Untersuchung des Nicht-gegenwärtig-Seins der Person und Polis; unbewältigte Vergangenheit

Kurzinhalt: First, what is the present? ... For Plato, therefore, the judgment is above all the investigation of the not-being-present of the sophists as individual persons,

Textausschnitt: 71a What now is the unmastered present? First, what is the present? The present can mean two things. In the first place, one can speak today of the ideologically and socially usual idea of the present as a point in the present (Gegenwartspunkt) lying between past and future. So the time of history is represented as going in a line from the past to the future through a point in the present, and from this viewpoint one understands the present. Thus contemporary events are events that occur in the year 1964; past events occurred in the year 1930. Against this linear conception of the present, which has existed only since the eighteenth century in this form as a thoroughly ideological notion, there is that other meaning of the present, in which the present is always related to the existence of man in his presence (Prsenz) under God. Insofar as - while existing and acting in immanent time - man exists under God, he has presence. And the meaning of the past and the future will become generally interpretable only when starting out from this presence. For otherwise everything would proceed irrelevantly in an external stream of time. What now does mastering the present mean? Under mastering the present there is a virtue to be understood, the virtue of placing the present of immanent time under the judgment of the presence under God. This kind of mastering, then, is a general human problem, not something of the modern era, not something for Germans only, but for everyman: to place the immanent present within the immanent process under the judgment of the presence. (Fs) (notabene)

71b These questions were clarified and formulated for the first time in classic politics, by Plato in the Politeia and in the Gorgias. To place oneself under the presence, under the presence of God, and according to that to adjudicate what one does as man and how one forms the order of one's own existence and the existence of society, that for Plato is an act of judgment. That means that man is always under judgment; hence the myths of judgment in the Gorgias and the Politeia. And because he is always under judgment, under the presence of God, in the sense of this "being-under-judgment" he must adjudicate how he acts and how others act and how this action brings about an order of society. For Plato, therefore, the judgment is above all the investigation of the not-being-present of the sophists as individual persons, and a not-being-present in the sense of the presence of the entire society insofar as it allows itself to be led and ordered-that means disordered-by sophistic ideas. So, what will be called political science arises in the critique of time in the sense of the empirically immanent society that does not place itself under the judgment in the presence of God. That is to say, the science of the order of man in society arises from the reaction against not existing in the present. We can say of Plato that he mastered the past of sophistry in a paradigmatic fashion, insofar as it reached into his time, and that he thereby mastered his own present and highlighted what the present, in the sense of this presence under God, meant. All science of politics begins with this. This mastering of the past, which is always a mastering of the present, was relatively simple in Plato's situation, for he had only to deal with the internal historical processes of the Hellenistic polis. (Fs) (notabene)

72a For us in the present situation the matter is much more complicated. We have a particular difficulty in mastering our present, since our society is dominated by different kinds of ideological principles and views-not only Marxist or National Socialist but also positivist, progressivist, secular-liberal, etc.-that erect the prevention of the mastering of the present into a principle. And this principle of prevention is already so old-it goes back at least two hundred years-that it has affected the entire Western, but particularly the German, situation and lays the greatest obstacles in the way of this very mastering, which has to be carried out again and again. So, if we wish to master the past in the sense of mastering the present, we are confronted with the task of clearing out all the ideological junk in order to make the conditio humana visible once again. (Fs) (notabene)

72b How can this be done? Again there are difficulties. For naturally one can only clear things out by becoming conscious of the presence and by having at one's disposal the expressions adequate for making it conscious. These adequate expressions are of course to be found in classical philosophy, in the whole history of Christianity, of scholasticism, etc., in humanistic philosophy up to the eighteenth century; they are absolutely the dominant ones. But under the influence of the development of the ideologies, which took over the classic and Christian vocabulary for understanding presence and reinterpreted it as an instrument for the prevention of knowledge of the presence under God, the words have simply changed their meanings. Therefore it is not easy even to speak about what is at issue here-for example, about the truth of existence, or freedom of existence under God-nor to speak about reason as the organ sensitive for the reception of transcendent being, or about the spirit, etc., for all these expressions have become ideologized. And this is an international, not only a German, problem. (Fs) (notabene)