Crisis and Eternal Present

One could say that since Hegel's philosophy has adopted rhetoric of crisis - rhetorics of an end, decadence, eschatology and apocalypse. We can trace this rhetorics in the work of numerous and diverse intellectual figures, such as Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Valery, Spengler, Heidegger, Lyotard and Kojeve. What is common to all these authors is an idea that history is about to stop, "values" about to disintegrate and human beings about to redefine, or even worse, lose their essence. Nietzsche's rhetoric of coming threat of nihilism, Marx's prophetic visions of decline of bourgeois society, Heidegger's words on the loss of Being, Husserl's famous krisis and Kojeve's influential idea of the end of history are all the expression of the same rhetoric. But let us be naive for a moment and ask ourselves: isn't it a little strange that philosophy doesn't become weary of this constant divination? How come philosophy claims that the mankind, history and philosophy itself are on a verge of a breakdown for nearly two centuries? Let's be even more abrupt: doesn't it get a little dull to constantly proclaim an almost certain end? How long do these values need to fall? After all, wasn't it already Nietzsche who turned our attention to the unstoppable threat of nihilism? But still - quotidian philosophical texts are full of warnings of the same nihilism monster and complete loss of all what is worthy. Why is it then that we, philosophers, are still driven by this mad compulsion of diagnosing the effects of decadence? Why are we still so happy to announce - every time an opportunity comes along - the corruption of men, the "withdrawal of the Being", the end of intellectual legacy of Europe, the closing act of history, the end of the "great narratives" or any other similar "epochal" event?

Of course, there's another trend of philosophers and thinkers firmly opposing themselves to this rhetoric. And to solve the aporia sketched above, we must undoubtedly turn to them. Michel Foucault (he is in fact not a philosopher of crisis, as he is usually regarded, based on some misreadings of his Mots et choses) stated in one of his interviews that the rhetoric of crisis is a kind of constant presence, a mark of a certain "eternal now". This indeed is a very enigmatic saying. How can it be that the rhetoric of crisis evoke an eternal presence, if the declaration of crisis is in its very essence a declaration of a certain gap in time? How can it be that those philosophers proclaiming the inevitable crisis in reality evoke eternal presence and homogeneous time, if crisis is in fact a void that separate two times, the time of "golden history" from that of decadence and decay? And, most importantly, how could krisis have such meaning, considering its original meaning (my Classical Greek dictionary says "separation, discord, dispute")? It seems that Foucault is quite mistaken on this point. But, if we look carefully at the rhetoric of crisis, we perceive that his statement is in fact very concise. Let's take a look at a typical statement that could be pronounced either by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler or Husserl: "Europe, its humanism and spirit, and everything we hold sacred is in a process of decay". What does this sentence say? Firstly, one could of course call forth the original meaning of krisis: this proposition says there is a fundamental discord between past and present. Past, the time of prosperity and immediate living in cultural and moral milieu is literally thrown back and the present, the time of uncertainty, threatening corruption and decadence is proclaimed. If we formalize a bit more: sentence says that something is thrown into past and by virtue of it the present is opened. In this final stage, what does then a prophet of crisis utters? He simply announces the presence as such. He says the openness of presence is constituted by excluding the fullness of past. In this sense, what is present becomes eternal: it is discorded from the past and thus from history. When Marx remarks crisis is coming he does not mean that we are entering a new epoche of relation between the means of production and production forces: his statement cancels this "epochity" as such. And when Nietzsche speaks about nihilism, he does not understand it as a new turn of genealogy of morals: this nihilism is something defying the very notion of genealogy. The philosopher of crisis is unable to name or define his epoche, because he sees in the present a force that annuls the historicity in itself. To him, the present does not allow any name or positive content. It is embodied decadence, a story out of history, a time thrown out of time. An eternal present in which we are caught since Hegel.