Gabriel Motzkin

Time and Technology in Heidegger’s Thought

In recent years a spate of books has appeared on clocks, the measurement of time, chronology, and how the history of time measurement has affected our conception of history.1 Quite another line of research into the past has investigated how the application of different time-frameworks discloses different durations and different intensities of change.2

The Tradition as an Alternative to Secular History in French Traditionalism

Whatever the long-run influence of the early nineteenth-century Tubingen School, the eclat of early nineteenth-century French Traditionalism was much greater, both because France was a much more important Catholic country in the early nineteenth century than the South German principalities (Tubingen even being located in a Catholic diaspora) and because the political resonance of French Traditionalism was immediate. The political consequences of French Traditionalism have been obscured in our retrospective view both because they were ambiguous, and because the political movements that were influenced by French Traditionalism did not choose to remember this particular spiritual ancestry.

The End of Continuity and Heidegger’ s Rediscovery of the Problem of Time

The Church’s rejection of Traditionalism did not stern from adesire to effect an accommodation with science; it preceded the efforts to reconcile science and religion. The Church rejected Traditionalism because it could not accept the Traditionalist vision of the interaction between religious and secular history. The French Traditionalists had sought to provide a continuity over time that is not retrospective. However, in order to make their case within the framework of the discourse of their time, they had to adopt the language and perspective of retrospection. They were ultimately unable to escape the constraints of the historical mentality through the expansion of the concept of tradition, however attractive the idea continued to appear weIl into the twentieth century.1 Although the tradition the Traditionalists provided appeared to be both prospective and eternal, the account that they gave of the tradition was a retrospective one; they had to justify the tradition in retrospective and historicist terms. Their account of the Tradition is ultimately an account from outside, an historical account, and not a nomothetical or apocalyptic account.

The Catholic Turn to Philosophy as an Alternative Tradition

Our story began with tradition as a set of practical injunctions and a way of conferring identity at the same time. The concept of tradition was disclosed as being applicable to the notion of a tradition of revelation legitimating institutions. Then tradition began to imply tradition as a constitution of individual identity in relation to a society as a tradition of feeling. The next step in our story, the working-out of the notion of a tradition of knowledge, should be seen as a rationalist reaction to the Romantic notion of tradition as a tradition of affect. The tradition of affect, as we saw, shared with the Enlightenment the notion that the basis for identity is innate. It substituted the notion of an emotional identity for an intellectual identity, feeling for reason, and suggested that feeling is what is innate and reason is what is acquired. In turn, the formulation of a tradition of knowledge in the late nineteenth century would continue to preserve this notion that knowledge is acquired rather than innate.

From Education to Criticism: Lenglet

Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy was almost a precise contemporary of SaintSimon’s. Yet the work he wrote that we shall consider was not a memoir. It was rather a guidebook for learning history, drawing upon a tradition of such guides. Lenglet’s guide included bibliographical essays on all the major domains and periods of history. Here we shall only consider the relatively few chapters he devoted to historical perspective in his Methode pour etudier l’ histoire.1 Drawing on an old rhetorical tradition, and especially on the quite different De l’usage de l’ histoire composed in 1671 by Cesar Vichard de Saint-Real, Lenglet also began with the claim that the instructive aim of studying history is in order to know oneself (I, 3), a claim that Saint-Simon was too clever to make. Yet even for Saint-Real the purpose of studying history was no longer that of studying the best management of public affairs, although Saint-Real still believed that a knowledge of human nature was available through the study of history; history was still supposed to be empirically useful. Lenglet’s idea of the relation between the development of the self and the purpose of the study of history was somewhat different. The self for Lenglet has other purposes than success in manipulation.

Memoirs and History: Saint-Simon

In these chapters I will apply the above theses to the analysis of two texts stemming from the period around 1700. The first is the introduction to the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. The second is a tractate about the best way to study history , entitled Methode pour etudier l’ histoire, by Lenglet du Fresnoy.

The Development of the Catholic Concept of Tradition from the Council of Trent to the Tübingen School

I have suggested that the introduction of subjectivity changed the problem of continuity because continuity had to be provided at two levels, at the individual level and at the collective level, and also a way had to be found of linking together the continuity provided at these two levels. In traditional religions, primacy was accorded to the provision of continuity at the collective or institutional level. Note that this statement is not the same as saying that these religions were past-oriented. As we shall see, their effect on the individual level was reverse: they oriented the individual to the future. Perhaps the provision of a retrospective continuity on an individual level for a Cartesian subjectivity made it possible to develop a prospective continuity on a collective level, turning society towards the future once the problem of continuity with the past had been resolved on the individual level. I do not think, however, that the problem is that simple and that the solution was so neat. In the modern world, projectivity and retrospectivity were effectively interwoven at every level, and the relation between the two was never stable.

Introduction: Religion and the Secular Concept of Subjectivity

By the 1740’s, long before Voltaire had been read in every corner of Europe, the outlines of the emergent secular culture were discernible. This secular counter-culture is not just a construct in my imagination as I hunt for anticipations of later currents of thought; anti-religious cynicism and skepticism about the claims of knowledge and the potential of values were wide-spread. Yet the Catholic Church, ever-vigilant against the threat of heresy and especially sensitive since the Reformation, did not appear unduly excited. In France, the energies of the religious were consumed by the struggle between Jesuits and Jansenists in the first part of the eighteenth century. The Church did make efforts to combat the spread of rural dechristianization through the expansion of the internal mission, the mission to countries and landscapes already Catholic, but the secession of the impoverished was at least as much a problem for the Church’s disposition to charity as it was for the preservation of its religious hegemony over culture.