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when a god, gods, or a god's envoys called to life this spiritual tribe and
endowed it with special privileges, imposed specific duties, opened for it
access to the saving truth, and entrusted it with a mission.
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both cases of kinship - by blood or spirit - history operates as a
binding force whereby a tribe identifies its exclusivity and opposes itself
to the entire outside world. People are historical in the sense that they
are monopolistic owners of the past in which the world, the tribe or
religion were grounded, and they need this past, of course, to give a
meaning to their lives and to the universe. Even though this community–
founding "historicity" is still alive to some extent both in national
consciousness and in religious bonds, it has been inexorably forced out
and enfeebled by the victorious march of the rationalism of the
Enlightenment and by the transition from tribal life to civil society.
It
has been repeatedly pointed out that there was a clear connec–
tion between the spread of the rationalist worldview on the ruins of the
religious legacy on one side and the formation of civil society (in
Rousseau's, not in Hegel's, sense) on the place of tribal kinship on the
other.
In
a civil society individuals gain their affiliation to the social
"whole" not by blood and genealogy, but by participation in an abstract
legal order. To define and to legitimate this affiliation, one needs no
historical considerations. What makes us a society is a power of law,
limited in space, and in relation to which individuals are identical. (It
took a long time, of course, before the juridic identity of people was
finally asserted; as long as legally defined estates and aristocratic privileges
remained in power, historical criteria, while weaker and weaker, were
still operating.) Briefly, one no longer needs history to validate a social
order and the place of an individual in it.
Rationalism in the modern sense, that is rationalism which
we
connect chiefly with the Cartesian heritage, emerged and won as a belief
that the validity of our thinking is defined by criteria that are employed
in the procedures of science. Rationalism and civil society -whichever
came earlier or was causally active - meet each other in the indifference
toward history or in the belief that
history makes nothing valid;
no validity
may be accepted, justified or explained by reference to history.
[t
is a
naive superstition to imagine that a statement is proved to be true by the
fact that it has been believed for a long time, that our ancestors believed
in it, that it was revealed as a god's word by a prophet, and so on. To
assert the truth of anything, we have at our disposal clear and uncondi–
tionally binding mathematical and empirical criteria elaborated by sci–
ence. Religious truth, too, is valid to the extent that it is made legiti–
mate rationally - "geometrically" or empirically. The history of science
itself is hardly relevant to the understanding of science; when the point is
to know the truth, for what do we need a long series of insane blunders?
