HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
25
ment a meaning is conceived and pursued as an end, all ends
inevitably turn and are degraded into means.
This example, meant to illustrate the identification of ends and
meaning, is certainly wholly inadequate to Marx's philosophy of
history. We chose it nevertheless because it shows the peculiar neglect
of the particular, which is the inevitable consequence of the apparent
elevation of an end to the higher level of meaning. In this version
of historical consciousness, which is by no means restricted to Marx
in particular or even to pragmatism in general, one tries once more
to escape the frustration and fragility of human action by construing
it in the image of making. What distinguishes Marx's own theory
from all others in which the notion of "making history" has found
a place, is only that he alone realized that if one takes history to be
the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must come a
moment when this "object" is completed, and that if one imagines
that one can "make history," one cannot escape the consequence
that there will be an end to history. Whenever we hear of grandiose
aims in politics, such .as establishing a new society in which justice
will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to
make the whole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the
realm of this kind of thinking.
In this context, it is important to see that here the process of
history, as it shows itself in our calendar's stretching into the infinity
of the past and the future, has been .abandoned for the sake of an
altogether different kind of process, that of making something which
has a beginning as well as an end. This process, however, is incapable
of guaranteeing men any kind of immortality because its end cancels
out and makes unimportant whatever went before: in the classless
society the best mankind can do with history is to forget the whole
unhappy affair, whose only purpose was to abolish itself. It cannot
bestow meaning on particular occurrences either, because it has
dis–
solved all of the particular into means whose meaningfulness ends the
moment the end-product is finished: single events and deeds .and
sufferings have no more meaning here than hammer and nails have
with respect to the finished table.
We know the curious ultimate meaninglessness arising from
all
the strictly utilitarian philosophies that were so common and so
characteristic of the earlier industrial phase of the modem age, when
