Money Wisdom #469

Before long, this specific legal meaning [of the early Greek word krisis] was extended to cover 'electoral decisions, government resolutions, decisions of war and peace, death sentences and exile, the acceptance of official reports, and, above all government decisions as such [a legal 'krisis' was a decision by trial and judgement by a sovereign third party].  To the extent that such decisions went on one after the other, the juridico-political idea of krisis entailed a temporality of linear succession. Each present slips into the past to make way for the next. By contrast, the time of religious krisis was non-linear and entangled, designating an experience in the present of an event that had yet to actually occur. Kosselleck traces this back to the first Greek translation of the Old and New Testaments, in which judgement meant the one eventually delivered by God. In Christian theology, the Last Judgement is a prophecy: it will arrive for all but nobody knows when. Salvation therefore demands that one obey God's Word in the present, simultaneously anticipating and experiencing a final crisis for humanity. Kosselleck calls this a 'cosmic foreshortening of time', emphasizing how each present is marked by an eternal return of the future. (p.24)


Buckhardt also engages creatively with the temporality of religious crisis. This is evident in the epochal character he ascribes to "genuine" (as opposed to 'incomplete') crises. The former usher in 'an absolutely new form of life... ...founded on the destruction of what has gone before', whereas the latter begin with a 'deafening clamour' for change but end up yielding none of the 'vital transformations' their onset seems to demand. On this basis, Buckhardt is able to diagnose an ongoing age of crisis, wherein a graveyard of aborted crises bequeaths to the future 'a great general crisis' not unlike the Last Judgement. Crucially, though, because this crisis-to-come is rooted in an enduring human desire for 'great periodical changes' its resolution is not determined in advance but instead posed in the form of an open question to humanity itself. Crisis therefore names an entire epoch whose time is defined by the pressure for a different future - a secular prophecy of change, only robbed of the telos that would guarantee a fate for the world." (p.27)


"Crisis," Koselleck argues, "becomes a structural signature of modernity" because it gives free scope to the historical imagination - "it takes hold of old experiences and transforms them metaphorically in ways that create altogether new expectations." (p.28)


'In every crisis situation,' [Debray] writes, 'there is an interplay of darkness and clarity.
The objective conditions provide a background, a containing framework of propositions, which restricts the spectrum of possible initiatives or responses to events, but that background then seems to fade... ...So much so that the outline, the thing that can be seen by everyone, shifts from the objective to the subjective, the indeterminate, with the initiatives of a few characters suddenly thrust into the forefront of the stage.
In this visual metaphor. 'darkness' is the slipping away of certainty that accompanies the overdetermination of crisis, while 'clarity' is the shape given to such an event by those who speak out on it. Crucially, though, this later process is as much a process of political praxis as it is one of theory. Try as we might to 'untangle' the knot of crisis, what it demands is instead to be 'cut'. He continues 'We must try to untangle it in theory... ...but only so as to be able to make practical decisions... ...[based on] resolutely simple, even simplistic-seeming, formulae for action.' In other words, it is only through the strategic reductionism of social agents that crises can ever be envisioned and resolved in one way or another. (pp37-38)

Amin Samman Crisis Thinking - History in Financial Times (2019) pages 24, 27, 28 and 37-38