history and the nose of Cleopatra

Pascal famously once wrote that, had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the world would have been irremediably different. it is easy to read this, under the guise of a certain pragmatism, as a statement on what or whom the fate of the world is really contingent upon; that is, the whims and passions of a very few ‘great men’, as they are so oft called — sovereigns and warriors, lords and tyrants —; such that even a thing as seemingly irrelevant as the size of the nose of one ruler could forever alter the trajectory of history. and yet Pascal, himself a davout Christian, was also very much aware that the wills of men, no matter how great they are, can do very little to alter the course of the world. he believed in miracles, more so than he believed in the concept of human subjectivity; and slept with one eye open, conscious of the fact that the world might end at any moment, had God willed so. knowing this, one is tempted to read the remark on Cleopatra not as a reflection on the illiberty of individuals in the face of absolute power, but as a reminder to those same worldly powers: that divine interruption has the final say over human affairs.

the work of history is relentless. even someone like Hegel, the most staunch of rationalists, couldn’t restrain himself from calling history a “slaughter-bench”… even he wept, gazing at the ruins of great empires. at last, even he believed historians had to face the truth of this catastrophe, although he himself couldn’t bear the sight for too long, and made a shield out of reason to avoid its piercing gaze, like Perseus. the articulation of history ‘in the future perfect’, which Hegel mastered so perfectly, is thus born out of this act of cowardice; it also happens to be the coronation of the modern subject — the coming of age of Descartes’ ego, one might say. and yet, ironically, the father of the modern philosophy of history, Vico, was far from a rationalist; he was a man of the Baroque era, this age of absolutism and absolute catastrophe, and it probably wouldn’t be implausible to suggest that when he coined the phrase: “verum ipsum factum” — the truth is made —, he was probably sharing an anxiety not dissimilar to that of Pascal: the certainty that, that which is true is itself contingent on its parameters; that the law depends upon the exception, and not the other way around.