Rereading Zambelios’ philosophical history in the light of the concept of ‘life’

The topos of political organicism in its German idealist version has in recent years been the subject of a reappreciation, with new emphasis on the concept of life it implies. What enables the conception of the body politic in terms of an organism is philosophy's admittance of rationality as a feature of organic life itself. Contemporary scientific theories of epigenesis, linked mainly to the name of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – who redefined life as a ‘dynamic process of self-formation and self-generation, a spontaneous, rational-purposive and autocausal becoming’ – were a key influence on idealist concepts of individual and political freedom.Footnote ⁷ Alluding to the importance of life as a mediating concept in the post-Kantian project of bridging the absolute and the material world, Karen Ng argues:

Although Zambelios is certainly far from providing any ‘systematic accounting’ of life, the obsession with the ‘living’ that punctuates his rhetoric should be placed in this context; and life should be read as a uniting link between the Idea and reality, the historical time where the Idea is actualized. References to life, embodiment, actuality, and biology run throughout Zambelios’ treatment of the nation, its history, its language, and its literature – often as a criterion of truth. The following are just some of many examples. We need history that is ‘animate, living, palpitating, true’ (‘ἔμψυχον, ἔμβιον, πάλλουσαν, ἀληθινήν’)Footnote ⁹; Christianity gave ‘flesh, soul, and movement’ (‘σάρκα, ψυχὴν, καὶ κίνησιν’) to what was an ‘abstract historical reminiscence’ (ΒM, 30), it installed the truth in the ‘living and palpitating heart of the people’ (‘ζῶσαν καὶ πάλλουσαν καρδίαν τῶν λαῶν’, ΒM, 601); by the end of the Byzantine period, the people (‘λαός’) was the only ‘actual, animate, active’ and ‘living’ (‘ζῶντος’) being (BM, 693; 684); the reality of the national rebirth is ‘living and palpitating’ (‘ζῶσα καὶ πάλλουσα’);Footnote ¹⁰ the Greek language should (but has failed to) develop ‘vitality and liveliness drawing on the present’ (‘ἰκμάδα καὶ ζωτικότητα ἀρυομένη ἐκ τοῦ παρόντος’); Footnote ¹¹ and language in general is to a people ‘expression of its physical organism, […] inseparable from its bodily qualities’ (‘ἀπόῤῥοια τοῦ φυσικοῦ ὀργανισμοῦ του […] ἀχώριστος τῶν σωματικῶν ἰδιοτήτων’).Footnote ¹² Greek poetry had been until recently nonexistent because it was ‘fleshless’ (‘ἄσαρκος’), ‘not imprinted on the palpitating and palpable truth’ (‘μηδόλως ἀποτυπωθεῖσα πρὸς τὴν πάλλουσαν καὶ ψηλαφητὴν ἀλήθειαν’). Footnote ¹³ Τhe poet should instead turn into an ‘anatomist’ (‘ἀνατόμος’), describing the ‘arteries’ of the nation's ‘vital organs’ his duty is to study ‘the specific ethical and physical biology of the nation in its entirety’ (‘σύνολον καὶ συγκεκριμένην τὴν ἠθικοφυσικὴν τοῦ ἔθνους βιολογίαν’).Footnote ¹⁴

The living organism is also invoked in Zambelios’ central notion of the nation's ‘wholeness’ (‘ὁλομέλεια’), famously foregrounded in the statement of his project in the opening pages of Ἄσματα: antiquity must lose some of its shining glory and Byzantium rise from its ashes, for the wholeness and unity of the nation to be reconstructed: ‘πρὸς ἐπισκευὴν ὁλομελείας καὶ ἑνότητος’ (Ἄσματα, 16). Essential for the ‘homogenization’ of time (ancient, Byzantine and modern) that sustains the national narrative,Footnote ¹⁵ ‘ὁλομέλεια’ raises problems as an object of historiographical exposition. This is because in the case of Greek history at least, whose origin ‘is sunk in the mists of the infancy of humanity, ‘ὁλομέλεια’ is not offered to observation (‘ὁ νοῦς τοῦ παρατηρητοῦ, εἴπερ καὶ μεγαλοφυὴς, ἀδυνατεῖ νὰ καταμετρήσῃ τὰς ἀναλογίας της’) but escapes the measure of science (‘ἐκφεύγει τὸ μέτρον τῆς ἐπιστήμης’ (Ἄσματα, 12). As a result, writes Zambelios, various historical schools have resorted to the division of the ‘vital principles’ (‘τὴν διαίρεσιν τῶν ζωτικῶν ἀρχῶν’), the ‘dismemberment of the single idea’ (‘τὴν διαμέλησιν τῆς μιᾶς ἰδέας’) of Greek history (12–13). The persistent drawing on the vocabulary of natural sciences, together with the critique of their dissecting methods and observation, leads us to Hegelian ground. In particular, it alludes to Hegel's argument in ‘Observing Reason’ – the section in the Phenomenology where the notion of the organic being is more fully developed – that the essence of the organism, and thus of life as such, is beyond observation and remains irreducible to the laws adopted by the scientific consciousness.Footnote ¹⁶

In opposition to the dissecting methods of science – and yet with clear affinities to contemporary scientific developments on epigenesis – Hegel defines the organism through the Kantian term for the internal teleology, Selbstzweck (‘self-purposeful activity’):

As already mentioned, the concept of life is all important in post-Kantian idealism's efforts to bridge the gap between Idea and reality – a concern which was also Zambelios’ own. Indeed, the self-purposeful organism as defined by Hegel gives objective, natural existence to the concept of the End, and, in fact, to the structure of the Concept tout court.Footnote ¹⁸ The latter is defined as a ‘necessary unity of identity and distinction’ - between subject and object, appearance and the supersensible world, being-for-consciousness and being-in-itself etc. – and this ‘difference as inner difference, or the difference in itself’ is also for Hegel ‘the difference as infinity’ (Phen. 97).Footnote ¹⁹ This is what allows Hegel to bring together life and infinity (‘This simple infinity, or the absolute concept, is to be called the simple essence of life’, Phen. 98), and to claim that it is only because of the limits of observing reason, because of its lack of understanding of internal teleology, that it fails to recognize that in the organism it has indeed found infinity, its own concept (Phen.142).

Strikingly, Zambelios further specifies as ‘infinite wholeness’ (‘ἀπείρου ὁλότητος’) (Ἄσματα, 19) his own understanding of the nation's organic life, its ‘ὁλομέλεια’. In this light, the equation of ὁλομέλεια to some general notion of ‘unity’ – readily related to a nationalist ideology of continuity, to which Zambelios’ work is stereotypically identified – should be at least qualified.Footnote ²⁰ The various elements that come together in the self-purposeful organism of the nation (‘γενικὸς τοῦ Πανελληνίου σκοπός’) (Ἄσματα, 15) – are not perceived as homogeneous or continuous, but stand in a vertiginous dialectic of identity and distinction, mediation and immediacy, negation and preservation. This, it is implied, will resist objective historiographical exposition and proof, in the same way the organism's life resists scientific observation for Hegel. Other developments of ‘infinite wholeness’ in Zambelios’ work give even stronger support to the view that Zambelios’ ideas have a Hegelian background. Hegel frequently describes the relation between the world we perceive and the supersensible world in terms of ‘rest’ (Ruhe) and movement (Bewegung), which stand in a ‘necessary unity of identity and distinction’:

And it is in terms of rest and movement that Zambelios renders the contrast between the supra-historical life of the nation and its vicissitudes in time. After the Roman conquest, he writes:

Awkwardly formulated, the passage does not immediately allude to the dialectics of the unity of identity and distinction, hich Zambelios does however echo more explicitly elsewhere (in relation to Orthodox mystagogy): ‘ἐν αὐτῇ δὲ τὰ πάντα μυστιπολεύονται ἡνωμένα τῇ διακρίσει, καὶ τῇ ἑνώσει διακεκριμμένα’ (Ἄσματα, 136).

The basic tenet of organic teleology (‘the necessity, which lies in what happens, is hidden, and it first shows itself at the end, but in such a way that this end shows that it was also to have been what was first’, Phen. 153) also informs Zambelios’ methodology, summed up in his ‘retrospective’ (‘ὀπισθόρμητος’) reading of history (on which more below).Footnote ²² In post-Hegelian discourses, retrospective interpretation had certainly gained autonomy from organicism. Footnote ²³ Yet the preoccupation with life remains dominant in the methodological tenets Zambelios lays out in the prefatory pages of his Ἄσματα more generally. It even renders the value of the folk songs he is publishing conditional: without the six hundred ‘introductory’ pages on the history of the Greeks that precede them, the folk songs would be lifeless ‘remains’ (‘ἁπλὰ φιλολογίας λείψανα’, 6). In Hegel's ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology, and part of his resistance to writing a Preface at all, it is also claimed that the work's aim as such is ‘the lifeless universal’, and that the results of a science are inseparable from its method, its process, and its execution (Ausführung), defined as the ‘science of the experience (Ehrfahrung) of consciousness’ (Phen. 5, 22).Footnote ²⁴ Zambelios subscribes to this view too: ‘Oἵα δὲ ἡ μέθοδος […] τοιαῦτα καὶ τὰ ἀποτελέσματα τῆς μελέτης’ (ΒΜ, 38). For Hegel, in order to count as an object of science at all, any end product must be mediated by the whole cyclical process of its life's development.Footnote ²⁵

Not only the folk songs, but national ideology itself leaves Zambelios cold if it comes without life. He seeks to make a distinction between his own project and certain words that could be taken as saying the same thing as he does, and which abound, he writes, in the newspapers of the time, and are on everyone's lips: ‘ἀποστολὴ, προορισμὸς, φυλὴ, παλιγγενεσία, πανελλήνιον’ (‘mission, historical destiny, race, national renaissance, Panhellenic’). The problem with these words, for Zambelios, is that they lack ‘historical sanction’ (‘ἱστορικῆς πιστώσεως’, 8) and thus ‘scientific value’ (‘ἐπιστημονικῆς ἀξίας’, 8): they do not bear the traces of the history of their development. If simply posited at the outset, they are ‘coins without authentic value’ (‘νομίσματα ἐλλείποντα τῆς αὐθεντικῆς τιμῆς’, 8) – and ‘truth’, writes Hegel, quoting Lessing, ‘is not a stamped coin issued directly from the mint and ready for one's pocket’ (Phen. 24). Life turns here into a claim to originality, the originality of one's Ehrfahrung as a process ‘through which self- consciousness, in distinction from and in relation to its objects, is continually enriched and transformed’.Footnote ²⁶ Zambelios gestures against the equation of his work with the ideological content of contemporary nationalism. Τhe implication is that even if he used the exact same words, these would still be different, because at the end of his account they would no longer be abstractions, but would have come to life with his own subjective, non-observable ‘experience’, an experience jealously set apart from the many, the national ideology of the layman.

‘The concept of transition’

Ιn the framework of his critique of the Enlightenment prejudice against Byzantium, Zambelios opposes himself to the pattern of ‘ἀκμὴ, παρακμὴ, πτῶσις’ established in the understanding of historical time by Montesquieu and Gibbon (Ἄσματα, 17), and claims that ‘fall’ is an ‘abstract’ word, and that what it actually means, is ‘transition’ (‘μετάβασις’) (Ἄσματα, 17). Zambelios does not object to the decline and fall model as such – in his own Byzantine Studies, Byzantium is not quite rehabilitated in its own right, only scrutinized, in a not particularly hopeful spirit, for ‘imprints’ (‘ὑποτυπώσεις’) of the rebirth of Greece in modern times (BM, 577). Footnote ²⁷ The problem is rather that Gibbon's writing smells of death (‘ὄζει γαιῶδές τι καὶ νεκριμαῖον καὶ ἐπιτύμβιον’, BM, 36), and that Enlightenment historians have only described the surface, what is easily discernible (‘εὐδιαγνώστου’, BM, 37): this stands in stark contrast with Zambelios’ Hegelian understanding of life's teleology, which is not observable but ‘hidden’ (Phen. 153). The same is true for the ‘general aim’, namely ‘the realization of the Idea of Spirit’, that drives the World History: this aim is initially ‘only in an implicit form that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct’ (‘der innere, der innerste bewußtlose Trieb’), which the whole process of History is directed to rendering conscious.Footnote ²⁸ For Zambelios, too, it is out of something hidden, implicit and internal to the nation's organism (‘μύχιον τῆς Νεοελληνικῆς ὑπάρξεως ὀργανισμόν’) that the spirit of the nation is ‘gradually incarnated in the biology of the middle ages’, and this is what Gibbon appears, in his view, to have missed (BM, 36-37).

Yet, the very fact that the aim of History is implicated in natural life (‘only in an implicit form that is, as Nature’), imposes delays on the Spirit's manifestation, and calls on the historian to follow the grades of its incarnation at a deliberate pace.Footnote ²⁹ As Hegel observes, the philosophical discourse whose object is ‘the actual, […] what is alive within itself’, must create its own moments and pass through them all, it must laboriously travel ‘down a long path (Weg)’, which Hegel even calls the ‘science of [a] path’ (Phen. 17, 22). The ‘long path’ becomes an insistent figure in Zambelios’ own writing: the historian must necessarily follow a ‘thorny’ and ‘rough’ (‘ἀκανθώδης καὶ δύσβατος’) road (‘ὁδός’) (Ἄσματα, 23). The sublimations of human spirit do not take place ‘all at once and suddenly’ (‘διὰ μιᾶς καὶ αἰφνιδίως’), but slowly and by degrees (‘βραδέως καὶ κατὰ βαθμοὺς’, BM, 136). This is for Zambelios especially true of the Greek nation, whose history is ‘protracted’ and interrupted (‘διακεκομμένον’), as opposed to Western nations, whose life is ‘short’ (‘βραχύς’, Ἄσματα, 11). Ironically, Zambelios blames the impatient access to truth on none other than Hegel, when it comes to the latter's negative account of Byzantium. In the Ἄσματα he condenses very accurately Hegel's contempt for Byzantium in the Philosophy of History: a ‘millennial series of cries’, a ‘disgusting spectacle of baseness’, where Christianity remained abstract and ‘separate from the organism of society’ (Ἄσματα, 140-141).Footnote ³⁰ Once again, the problem with Hegel's view is not so much the prejudice against Byzantium as its underlying cause: the expectation that Christian Revelation could be absorbed by contemporary society ‘immediately and unpreparedly’ (‘ἐν τῷ ἅμα καὶ ἀπροπαρασκευάστως’, Ἄσματα, 140). Zambelios attributes to Hegel the most anti-Hegelian expectation of an immediate, time-abolishing access to truth. At the same time, he appropriates the Hegelian insight on the inseparability of truth and the ‘path’ for his own interpretation of a number of intellectual and historical cases. One of Zambelios’ favourite examples is provided by fourth-century theology, built on the dialectic of the absolute and its gradual unravelling in historical consciousness: fourth-century theologians covered the newly revealed religion with an ‘artful mystery’ (‘μυστήριον […] πανέντεχνον’), sensing that ‘the application of universality’ must be ‘difficult and slow’. God having revealed himself once, they turned him into God again for the economy of the future (‘πάλιν ἐποίησαν αὐτὸν Θεὸν πρὸς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ μέλλοντος’) (Ἄσματα, 139). What makes God God is the mystery that calls for the long and slow labour of interpretation.

Most importantly, the way Zambelios elaborates on the notion of transition itself in the ‘biology of the middle ages’ is indebted to Hegel. We will here focus on the transition on which his entire historionomical project depends, the transition from the Byzantine to the modern Greek era – a transition charged with redeeming Byzantium's death. The death of Byzantium, on Zambelios’ account, came about when the three dominant principles sustaining Byzantine political life – Roman monarchy, religious authority and the Attic language – were no longer part of the ‘living flesh’ (‘ζωντανὴ σάρκα’) of the ‘living people’ (‘τοῦ ζῶντος λαοῦ’) and had turned into mere ‘reminiscences’ (‘ἀναμνήσεις’) ‘enshrined’ (‘ἐγκεκτισμέναι’) in the past (BM, 684). It is then – at a moment that in Ἄσματα is identified as a transition from one political stage to the next (‘μετάβασις ἀπὸ ἑνὸς σταδίου πολιτεύσεως πρὸς ἄλλο’, 501) – that a fourth principle emerges: the nameless people (‘ἀκατανόμαστος λαός’), who already wear their Neohellenic garb (BM, 684). The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is presented by Zambelios as the result of a providential economy synonymous with the historical law that determines progress, but also as the result of a certain election (‘ψήφῳ’), a certain will (‘θέλημα’) of the people themselves:

As Koubourlis notes, Zambelios’ interpretation of the fall of Constantinople is among the aspects οf which Paparrigopoulos took a favourable view in his unsigned review of Ἄσματα in the journal Πανδώρα in 1852. There the people's involvement in the Fall is understood as a ‘decision’: the Greek people ‘decided’ (ἀπεφάσισε) to give up the empire, in order to save the integrity of Orthodoxy and nationality. Footnote ³¹ And it is quite true that in Ἄσματα, this is the rhetoric Zambelios himself uses, in a context which juxtaposes the fall of 1453 to the alternative of having capitulated to the Western Papacy (Ἄσματα, 494-504). More specifically, in the Ἄσματα the fall is presented as the result of intense thought: the Byzantine people, after having ‘maturely’ (‘ὡρίμως’) and ‘rationally’ (‘νουνεχῶς’) ‘examined’ the stakes, after having for three entire centuries pondered on (‘συνεσκέφθη’) the best way to die, finally ‘preferred’ (‘προετίμησε’) to surrender to the Ottomans, in order to save the religion that for Zambelios lies at the heart of national identity, their ‘ἐθνοθρησκεία’) (Ἄσματα, 500).

However forced this argument may seem, the idea of a nation's death by its own accord can be illuminated by the remarks on the transition from the old to a new national spirit that Hegel formulates in his Philosophy of History, a work that Zambelios seems to have known well. For Hegel, ‘the very essence of Spirit is activity’ and the activity displayed by a certain National Spirit is sustained as long as it fights against external violence and obstacles (PhH, 90). But once a nation has achieved ‘full reality’, activity is no longer needed, because it has been satisfied (‘it has its desires’ [‘er hat was er will’], PhH, 91). It is then that a nation enters the dull period of senility which Hegel identifies with ‘customary life’ (Gewohnheit). The temporality of Gewohnheit is that of ‘formal duration’, without the ‘fulness and zest that originally characterized the aim of life’, ‘the watch wound up and going on of itself’ (PhH, 91). For Zambelios too, as we saw, Byzantium's existence by its end is lifeless, ossified; the three main principles that sustained it have become dead reminiscences. And in Ἄσματα he identifies the last two centuries of Byzantium as indeed empty time, when nothing important is achieved (‘οὐδὲν σπουδαῖον κατορθοῡται’), nothing great is planned (‘οὐδὲν μέγα σχεδιάζεται’), the nation running its course in a way that resembles the mechanical walking of a pilgrim whose only concern now is arrival (Ἄσματα, 494).

Although a life outliving its own vitality would bring on ‘natural death’, continues Hegel, this is not in fact what happens with the National Spirit if it is indeed world-historical, if that is, it belongs to Universal History. On the contrary, in the case of such a National Spirit ‘natural death appears to imply destruction through its own agency’ (‘an ihm erscheint vielmehr der natürliche Tod als Tötung seiner durch sich selbst’) (PhH, 92). This is because the nation, being not an individual life, but ‘spiritual’, ‘generic life’, does not die in time – only in thought (PhH, 94). For Hegel, that National Spirit makes itself ‘the object of thought’, means that it ‘comprehends the universal element which it involves [as part of the Universal Spirit]. Zambelios does not of course reproduce the entire problematic, but his own insistence on thought and thinking on the eve of 1453 in the Ἄσματα, is likely yet another echo of his many unacknowledged Hegelian debts. Even more so, that thought involves in both Hegel and Zambelios a double movement, that of the annihilation of the nation's determinate previous life, and that of an elevation to ‘another, and in fact a higher principle’ (PhH, 95). The thought involved in the transition from the old to the new National Spirit, writes Hegel, is of ‘the highest importance in apprehending and comprehending history’. And it is precisely the notion of transition that bears all the weight in Zambelios’ philosophical historiography, if he is to integrate Byzantium as a stage in the history of the Greeks.

The higher principle is for Hegel the ‘something new’ that the National Spirit comes to desire (‘etwas Neues zu wollen’), after all old wants have been satisfied (PhH, 92). It is worth insisting on the nature of this ‘desire’, which looms large in Zambelios’ own account of transition. Hegel writes that if nations had only desires [‘Begierden’] compelling them to activity – desires that is, exclusively referring to life – their deeds, and the nations themselves, would simply vanish without trace [‘spurlos’] into all-devouring time (PhH, 92). But we have seen that it is not only such desires that govern them: there can also be a desire that brings about the self-imposed death of the nation. That death is for Hegel not an external event, but an internal drive of life itself, is attested by a number of other passages in his work, of which it suffices to mention here the twin passage to the pages on transition in the Philosophy of History and the last section of the Philosophy of Nature, which is characteristically entitled ‘The Self-induced destruction of the Individual’ (‘Der Tod des Individuums von sich selbst’). There the inner purpose of natural life appears linked not to self-maintenance but to death.Footnote ³² In Zambelios too, the desire of the people that presides over the transition from the Byzantium to modern Greece inscribes an impulse that is towards life and death indistinguishably. It is out of the urge for annihilation that there emerges, like the phoenix, the fiery sword of a rebirth (‘ἡ φλογερὰ ῥομφαία τῆς ἐπαγγελλoμένης Ἀναγεννήσεως’). If we bear in mind that for Hegel historical agents produce results ‘beyond that which they aim and obtain’ (PhH, 42), beyond their conscious will and intentions, and that the aim of History is hidden and implicit, then we can better understand the choice (ψήφῳ’) of the people that determined the transition from the Byzantine to the modern era: for both Hegel and Zambelios, it is an unconscious desire for life and death at once that drives history.Footnote ³³

At the end of the Byzantine Studies, Zambelios returns to the idea of the ‘slower’ (‘βραδυτέρα’) development of ‘our’ nation in comparison to occidental nations, and rewrites it in terms, precisely, of desire: Western nations progress because they ‘want to’ (‘θέλοντες’) and seek to’ (687). The Greeks’ progress, on the contrary, is ‘passive’ (‘παθητική’), motivated by external obstacles (Persians, Saracens, Papacy, Iconoclasm, Francocracy, Crusaders, Venetians, Ottomans). In a word – so runs Zambelios’ surprising conclusion – the Greeks progress ‘unwillingly’ (‘ἄκοντες’) (687). In seeming contradiction to the ‘decision’ for the fall as a means of progress, ‘ἄκοντες’ rather reveals what was there all along, desire's unconscious striving against ήitself towards an unknown aim. Crucially, the vicissitudes of desire suggest a breach in the conception of the nation as a living organism. Hegel's often overlooked insistence on the differences between natural and spiritual teleology sheds light on the complication. Although the teleological connotations of organicism suggest otherwise, Hegel remarks that growth in the realm of nature differs from growth in the realm of Spirit: ‘[Spirit's] expansion, therefore, does not present the harmless tranquility of mere growth, as does that of organic life, but a stern reluctant working against itself (‘die harte unwillige Arbeit gegen sich selbst’) (PhH, 71). It is plausible that Zambelios’ ‘ἄκοντες’ appropriates Hegel's ‘unwillige Arbeit’ as an attribute of Spirit that ‘hides [its] goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation from it’ (PhH, 71), and contrasts it to the ‘automatic’ (‘αὐτόματος’, BM, 687) progress he attributes to the Westerns, the progress one encounters in nature.

Spirit's conflictual manifestation is however to be understood not in isolation from, but in the very terms of, the organicist philosophical frame. It is precisely because Spirit is, as we have seen, embedded in material substance, precisely because the very faculties that mediate the realization of Spirit's Idea, consciousness and will, are initially sunk in a hidden, unconscious, natural substratum – and because the separation of Spirit from natural life always remains ‘imperfect and partial’ (PhH, 73) – that Spirit's development is hindered, that Spirit ‘is at war with itself” and ‘has to overcome itself as its most formidable obstacle’ (PhH, 71). The following section will further explore this inherent tension of the organicist conception of Spirit, national or otherwise, and follow its traces in Zambelios’ rhetoric.

The weak life of the nation

In Hegel's Philosophy of History the organicist conception of Spirit is proposed as the philosophical frame in which to grasp the workings of the transition: ‘We may compare [Spirit] with the seed; for with this the plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant's entire life.’ What follows, however, is a remarkable twist, which makes even more clear what was implicit in the entire discussion on the transition: that the ‘thirst’ for life is at the same time the ‘thirst’ for death:

The organic model for spiritual teleology is here not abandoned but turned on its head, in a way that reveals the radical, structural contamination of all political organicisms by death: death is not only the condition for new life, but is life's inescapable shadow.Footnote ³⁴ The life of spirit is weak, as is the life of the plant: they both produce something that falls in the gap between beginning and end, even though conceptually the end mirrors itself in the beginning. The other side of Zambelios’ ‘ὀπισθόρμητος’ method – modelled, as we saw, on an organicist concept of the national spirit – is precisely this dislocation, what Rebecca Comay in a brilliant work on Hegel and the French Revolution has called a ‘grinding nonsynchronicity’ at the heart of historical experience.Footnote ³⁵ The meaning of each and every historical present is not to be found in the present itself: it always depends on a future moment for its appearance. The idealist reading après-coup already inscribes the traumatic structure of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit: historical experience is the ‘belated and vicarious experience of the missed experience of the other’.Footnote ³⁶

Such a structure surfaces often in Zambelios’ rhetoric. If, from today's point of view – he writes – and especially after 1821, the Fall of Constantinople makes sense as a stage in the providential economy of history, people at the time had no access to this meaning: they only experienced the ‘despair’ (‘ἀπελπισία’) of the hope for mercy till the last moment (Ἄσματα, 512). And he devotes some eloquent pages to the despair of the last Byzantine emperors as they wandered miserably from court to court in the West, mumbling dogmas and promises against themselves, half deceiving and half self-deceived (Ἄσματα, 512–535). It is a story that repeats itself. From the point of view of 1453, where the people are said to have preferred annihilation over accommodation with the Papacy, the sack of Constantinople in 1204 makes sense, because it contributed to the preservation of the ‘indigenous religious spirit’. By contrast, the sack of Constantinople in 1204 was a time of ‘confusion’ and ‘disorder’, of total lack of coordination of the elements of the ‘Byzantine organism’, a period therefore of sickness for the nation (‘ἀσθενούσης ἐθνικότητος’, Ἄσματα, 434–5). Afterwards, Zambelios comments, God provided the ‘convalescent’ (‘ἀναρρωνύων’) with the remedy of the disaster's historical benefits (‘ἱστορικὰ εὐεργετήματα’) (Ἄσματα, 434). But, like the Hegelian fruit, this pharmakon is a fatal poison for the people who become History's mere instruments. No less than for Hegel, history is for Zambelios this ‘slaughter bench’ (PhH, 35), where the World-Spirit uses individuals for its own purposes and discards them once it has finished with them.

Despite appearances, the Greek War of Independence in 1821 is also affected by the same pattern of the deferral of meaning from one generation to the next. In Zambelios’ ‘ὀπισθόρμητος’ method, 1821 seems to be the ultimate landmark, conferring meaning on all previous history: not only does the significance of the Byzantine period depend on the national rebirth, but without 1821 the entire European history, the universal history of the Middle Ages, would ‘wither’ and ‘dry up’ (‘μαρανθῇ, και ξηρανθῇ’, Ἄσματα, 502). And yet, at the end of the Byzantine Studies we read that 1821 is only an inadequate first token (‘πρῶτον δοκίμιον’) of national rebirth (BM, 694): at the time of Independence, as in Zambelios’ present moment, the people have not yet assumed full agency in their historical drama, have not raised to the full consciousness of their historic destination (BM, 395). Like all previous summits, the War of Independence has its stability as a source of meaning destabilized in the name of a future which at the time Zambelios writes is still to come. For Zambelios, this future takes on geopolitical and irredentist aspects, at the intersection of orthodox providentialism, Rigas’ vision of a ‘Hellenic Republic’, and Kolettis’ ‘Great Idea’ (BM, 696). Footnote ³⁷ Yet it inscribes itself in a broader structure or ‘plane of historicity’. As Reinhart Koselleck puts it, modern Revolution ‘appears to unchain a yearned-for future while the nature of this future robs the present of materiality and actuality’. The need for repetition is inbuilt in Revolution, which reproduces Reaction by fixing an end-point, an ‘ultimate paradise’ in a future that is not one: a ‘futureless future’, an ‘evil endlessness’.Footnote ³⁸

The deferral of meaning from one generation to the next yields glimpses of an unredeemed present. It is arguably symptomatic that the very first chapter of Byzantine Studies opens with a scene that alludes not to ‘infinite’, but to finite, mortal life – a scene of anatomy. By contrast with philosophy, whose object is the living, self-purposeful activity of an organism, anatomy, writes Hegel, considers parts and organic systems ‘according to the abstract side of dead existence’ (Phen. 158). And yet, it is to a doctor that Zambelios compares the historian-philosopher, ready to attempt the ‘anatomical diagnosis’ of Byzantine society, to investigate the ‘vital organs of the body’ (‘τὰ ζωτικὰ τοῦ σώματος ὄργανα’), so as better to evaluate the ‘psychological internal arrangement of the dead’ (‘τὴν ψυχολογικὴν τοῦ ἀποβιώσαντος διοργάνωσιν’) (ΒΜ, 65). Certainly, if Zambelios wishes to open up Byzantium's corpse, it is to see how it could be organicized once again within national teleology. Yet no indication of a redemption accompanies this inaugural anatomical scene, which can itself be read as the repetition of a failure. In the ‘Προθεωρία’ to the Byzantine Studies, Byzantium's severed parts – heart, hands, and legs – are said to lie scattered in the ‘viscera’ of the fatherland, while only abstractions and empty reminiscences – the head alone - have survived in the Byzantine chronicles (ΒΜ, 25-26). Given Zambelios’ interest in reintegrating the scattered limbs into the nation's living organism, the change brought about by the archaeological ‘earthquake’ of 1821 seems rather disappointing: what then emerged from the sands of the desert, revealing Byzantium's entire hidden pattern, was nothing but a ‘statue, perfect, complete, well-made’ (‘ἄγαλμα τέλειον, ὁλομελὲς, ἀρτίως κατεσκευασμένον’, ΒΜ, 26). The passage is revealing of the persistent intrusion of techne, a remnant of eighteenth-century, mechanical organic models, in idealist political organicisms as well.Footnote ³⁹ Βut the recourse to the rhetoric of the statue might also speak of a slackening of Zambelios’ own interest in idealist reversals. In fact, in the later text ‘Ὁ κ. Ιούλιος Τυπάλδος’ (1860), it is in the body parts and the organs themselves in which he seems interested. In this text, the duties of the ‘anatomist’ are expanded from the historian of the Byzantium to the national poet in general, who should lean with a ‘microscope’ over the ‘innermost mechanism of the organism of our heart’, not in order to celebrate the nation's achievements and previous glories, but in order to feel its ‘weaknesses’ (‘ἀδυναμίας). In the same text, he opposes Greek poetry's floating in idealist clouds (‘μετεωρισμὸς τῆς ἰδέας’) with a call for a ‘philosophy of the present’, a study of the world and man as they are and not as they ought to be in future – a turn, in the final analysis, to ‘experimental science’ (‘ἐπιστήμη πειραματική’) and ‘positive knowledge’ (‘θετικὴ γνώση’). Here, life separates from infinity and bends to the finite, the concrete and palpable,Footnote ⁴⁰ tinged with the melancholy Zambelios recognizes as a perennial feature of the Greek people.Footnote ⁴¹ Accordingly, the romantic dialectic of the ‘ὀπισθόρμητος’ method has been significantly modified: Providence humiliated (‘ἐταπείνωσε’) the Greek people through successive losses and foreign enslavements not in view of some future redemption, but in order to teach patience, and mitigate ‘vanity’ through shame (‘ἵνα διὰ καταισχύνης καταβάλῃ τὸν τύφον μας’).Footnote ⁴²