Permanent Values and Historical Process

Widespread historicism and rampant empiricism, two of the most common characteristics of today’s culture, acquire a particular relevance in light of the problem of the permanence of values in history. Today’s historicistic mindset does not take the form of a rigorous or precise theory, even though it derives from nineteenthand twentiethcentury historicism, whether in its idealistic, materialistic or culturalistic forms; rather, it gains its strength from being the more or less conscious criterion of current evaluations by the majority of cultured individuals, and compensates for its lack of philosophical rigor by being a truly integral form of historicism. This mindset carries the historicistic principle of veritas filia temporis [truth is the child of its time] to its most extreme consequences: that is, a historical form has no other value than its exact correspondence with the time in which it is born and of which it is simply a product; thus it possesses a momentary and ephemeral reality, and it is quickly confined to an irrevocable and definitive past. This historicistic mindset often combines somewhat coherently with a form of practicism. When Nietzsche denounced the sterility of historicism, he correctly meant to show that it was impossible to confront the present with categories that belonged to the past: An understanding that justifies everything, and thus rejects judging and acting, might perhaps be able to penetrate the past, but on the present will only have a paralyzing effect. Nothing but a dangerous rift between thought and action could follow from it: On the one hand, action—which is in itself destined to the present—is released from thought, that is, it becomes pure praxis; on the other hand thought—once released from action—is kept in the past, in fact confined to it, and remains there, rendered sterile and infertile.