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excellence. A new science that could emancipate man from natural scarcity and the malignancy
of Chance, and at the very least from the ongoing consciousness of death—by making
conditions more pacific as well as by extending mortality to a more indefinite future—could
allegedly produce the human good.
Implicit, therefore, in the new science was the perception that the good for man could be
attained without the necessity of moral and political action, indeed it could go hand in hand with
the eventual abolition of the political. Both the moral/political and scientific components of
Modernity posited a possible linear History moving toward an end that could radically transform
the human condition. When the two dispensations were conjoined, one could posit that the end
toward which History moved involved the abolition of the political, the actualization of high
moral purpose and a technical foundation for the human good simultaneously. This represents
the completed manifestation of the Modern idea of linear history. In the thought of Hegel, and
in a less consistent fashion Marx, this outcome was finally given the patina of inevitability and
not mere desirability.
The idea of a linear history conceptually requires that History must have two termini.
There has to be a beginning point and an end point. A conceptual frame has to be projected to
give meaning to the seeming flux of actual events. Without philosophically positing two
philosophical termini it is impossible to posit that history isn’t cyclical, repetitive or simply
random. The empirical data of history itself is always chaotic. In effect, the first movement
toward a linear understanding of history was to be found in the Christian conception of time. For
the Christian, history is seen as stretched out between the creation and the second coming.
History, like the cosmos, comes into Being and until it ends is an unchanging stage for the deeds
of sinners who themselves might be redeemable by their actions even if History itself is
incapable of such redemption.
The possibility of a line that in effect has a direction other than changelessly uniform
requires other premises. One finds those premises in the thought of authors like Kant, Hegel and
Marx who posit a linearity of ascent. Postmodern authors like Nietzsche and Heidegger, and
scores of their epigones, posit a more or less linear descent from the origins of the West to their
present. The Greeks by comparison could not arrive at a linear understanding of history.
Philosophically they were committed to the eternity of the cosmos, without beginning and
without end. While they prophesized cyclical cataclysms, they did not prophesize the end of the
Convention