The Triadic Moment: The Anti-Genealogy of Hellenist Marxism

Abstract

[Extract] Some of the most powerful and least sentimental philosophy of the modern age has owed its bite to an intimate familiarity with the classical Mediterranean world. Nietzsche's tragic agon, Lukacs' epic totality and, Arendt's vita activa were signature ideas of a cast of brilliant minds, who - unlike liberal thinkers from Mill to Hayek to Ferry - kept their distance from the demoralizing and despritualizing drive of modernity, and yet did so in a was that was neither crusty nor reactionary nor pined for a golden age in the past. On the contrary, even paradoxically, there is an emphatically modern current that runs through their thinking. Less modern perhaps than Emile Durkheim for whom the autopoetic 'moralities' of differentiated professions seemed an adequate consolation for the deracination of life by contractual and utilitarian imperatives; but more modern than the other great 'founder' of social thought - Max Weber - who, while defending the 'realism' of the Durkheimian view that the best we have are strong professional moralities (vocations) and accepting the correlate of this (the polytheism of 'value' systems in the modern world) - seemed also to dream of a lost order in which geoscopic religious ethics held firm against the functional bureaucratic imperatives that dominate modern life. Somehow, for Weber, the choice of vocation was, in the end, not enough. He yearned for something more; at least this is what his meticulous investigations of Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu ethics suggest.