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announced aloud - in the structuralist ideology - that the knowledge of
history in the usual sense (which included an insight into conscious hu–
man intentions) is both impossible and useless and, later on, in a further–
going discovery, that each meaning we imagine ourselves to have found
in the past is our own meaning, imposed by us. No text, for instance, has
a meaning in itself (presumably with the exception of the texts of the
authors who say precisely that: No text is meaningful in itself); a con–
venient theory, one may observe, insofar as it liberates us from reading:
whatever we read, we in fact read nothing.
And so
homo historicus
has committed suicide to some extent and
has been resurrected to some extent, namely as the nihilistic man. And
where do we stand now, shortly before the closing of the century, with
our uncertainty about history, our discomfort in history, our yearning
after history? Have the once historically-grounded, but then history-less,
nihilism and relativism that Husserl warned us about early in the century
proved irrevocably and ultimately victorious?
The utopian mentality, after so many dreadful disappointments,
seems to have declined. There are apparently fewer and fewer people
who believe that there is a technique which will lead us infallibly to a
paradise where all human needs have been satisfied and all conflicts have
disappeared. It is instead doubtless that we will have to employ more and
more effort, toil, and money to repair damages we have brought upon
ourselves, to ward off ecological calamities and to solve intractable
demographic problems; it would be naive to hope that all of us are go–
ing to have more and more of everything in the indefinite future. The
utopian trust in the benevolent designs of history seems to be waning.
But relativism, released from its "historicist" origins, seems to stay in ro–
bust health. In its popular, widespread form, it teaches us that we have
no unconditional criteria by which to evaluate and confront with one
another various civilizations, belief systems or norms, and that whatever
makes a part of a civilization is therefore legitimate. Briefly, slavery is as
good as freedom; at any rate, neither is "better" in a palpable sense. The
more theoretically elaborated relativism of pragmatic persuasion appeals
to the concept of consensus and assures us that, as long as we are capable
of coming to a consensus, everything is in order and we do not need
to
bother about anything else.
Since this relativism is clearly associated with the American mental–
ity, it is perhaps not out of place to point out the difference between
the American and the German mind. The American mind, for instance,
seems to say: "Nobody here defends slavery. It would be indeed extraor–
dinary to find someone who says that there is nothing wrong with slav–
ery, that slavery is just fine and it is a pity that it has been abolished. Thus
we may safely state that there is a consensus about the evil of slavery and
