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PARTISAN REVIEW
For those engaged in the quest for meaning and understanding,
what is frightening in the rise of totalitarianism is not that it is
something new, but that it has brought to light the ruin of our cate–
gories of thought and standards of judgment. Newness is the realm of
the historian who, unlike the natural scientist concerned with ever–
recurring happenings, deals with events which always occur only
once. This newness can be manipulated if the historian insists on
causality and pretends to be able to explain events by a chain of
causes which eventually led up to it. He then, indeed, poses as the
"prophet turned backward" and all that separates him from the
gifts
of real prophecy seems to be the deplorable physical limitations of
the human brain, which unfortunately cannot contain and combine
correctly all causes operating at the same time. Causality, however,
is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences.
Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any
number of past "causes" which we may assign to it (one has only to
think of the grotesque disparity between "cause" and "effect" in
an event like the First WorId War); this past itself comes into being
only with the event itself. Only when something irrevocable has
happened can we even try to trace its history backward. The event
illuminates its own past, it can never be deduced from it.
Whenever an event occurs that is great enough to illuminate
its own past, history comes into being. Only then does the chaotic
maze of past happenings emerge as a story which can be told, be–
cause
it
has a beginning and an end. What the illuminating event re–
veals is a beginning in the past which had hitherto been hidden; to
the eye of the historian, the illuminating event cannot but appear as
an end of this newly discovered beginning. Only when in future
history a new event occurs will this "end" reveal itself as a be–
ginning to the eye of future historians. And the eye of the historian
is only the scientifically trained gaze of human understanding; we
can
understand
an event only as the end ,and the culmination of
everything that happened before, as "fulfillment of the times" ; only
in action will we proceed, as a matter of course, from the changed
set of circumstances that the event has created, that is, treat it as a
beginning.
Whoever in the historical sciences honestly believes in causality
actually denies the subject matter of his own science. Such a belief
