Horizon's End: The Crisis of History in Grant and Nietzsche

Abstract

<p>George Grant sees Nietzsche as the foremost thinker of what it means to conceive time as history, and so discount the notion of eternal truth. In Time as History (1969), he presents a reading of Nietzsche's thought in tandem with a critique of the modern self-conception of humanity as maker of history and dominator of nature. Yet Nietzsche is not merely an expositor of what it means to be modern but, like Grant, a critic of modernity's politically and spiritually fragmenting consequences. Although Grant is an avowed Christian Platonist, and Nietzsche an avowed anti-Christian and anti-Platonist, they share a positive appraisal of the necessity of mythic consciousness to counterbalance the relativizing effect of historicism. While both believe a healthy social order requires myths to communicate humanity's proper place in the cosmos, they differ in that Nietzsche sees the supra-historical character of the cosmos as tragic in the classical sense, while Grant affirms the existence of a dimly perceivable but ultimately redemptive supernatural order. Therefore their respective cosmologies imply sometimes overlapping, but ultimately divergent, prescriptive guidelines to conduct and thought.</p>