Hannah Arendt
HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
The modern concept of process pervading history and
nature alike separates the modern age from the past more profoundly
than any other single idea. To our modern way of thinking nothing
is
meaningful in and by itself, not history nor nature taken as a
whole, and certainly not particular occurrences in the physical order
or specific historical events. There is a fateful enormity to this state
of affairs. Invisible processes have engulfed every tangible thing, every
individual entity that is visible to us, degrading them into functions
of an over-all process. The enormity of this change is likely to escape
us if we allow ourselves to be misled by such generalities as the
disenchantment of the world or the alienation of man, .generalities
that often involve a romanticized notion of the past. What the concept
of process implies is that the concrete and the general, the single
thing or event and the universal meaning have parted company. The
process, which alone makes meaningful all that it comprises, has
thus acquired a monopoly of universality and significance.
Certainly nothing more sharply distinguishes the modern concept
of history from that of antiquity. For this distinction does not hinge
on whether or not antiquity had a concept of world history or an
idea of mankind as a whole. What is much more relevant is that
Greek and Roman historiography, much as they differ from each
other, both take it for granted that the meaning or, as the Romans
would say, the lesson of each event, deed, or occurrence is revealed
in and by itself. This, to be sure, does not exclude either causality
or the context in which something occurs; antiquity is as aware
of these as we are. But causality and context are seen in a light pro–
vided by the event itself, illuminating a specific segment of human
affairs; they are not envisaged as having an independent existence
of which the event would only be the more or less accidental though
adequate expression. Everything that was done or happened con-
